One of the early things I started doing with this blog, actually with the predecessor to this blog, was going through encryption examples longhand. And I was going to start with a simple hash like MD5, except it turns out to be the opposite of simple. So I decided to do DES, which seems to baseline a number of other common tools.
I got through 10 iterations of 16 and realized I’d been doing a step wrong since iteration 3. Tossed that all away after months of trouble. Then I started again, I got through 6 iterations and realized I was getting two arrays reversed on occasion.
Then I started on it AGAIN, with a plan to have my pages laid out to copy data A to B, 1 to 2, and keep everything in line. Only by now, I’m no longer enthused by doing DES a third time. It’s a serious PITA! Add to that the issue that once I finish DES, this was one of the “easy” ones. Which means the rest get harder. Un*x password files are saved via crypt, which is based on multiple passes of DES.
So after a year of doing 16 iterations of DES, I’d be moving on to doing 48 iterations of DES. And then things would really get hard. So I’m thinking this isn’t working. I’ve now moved to what had originally been stage 2 plan, which was to develop scripts that would produce the longhand for looking at. Hopefully I’ll get DES done in the next week or so. I’ll post the script and the output if I get that working.