I was trying to decide on the easiest way to make a graphical user interface for the Scarne’s Challenge puzzle game that I’ve been experimenting with. I stumbled upon pygame, a simple game programming library that uses Simple DirectMedia Layer library to provide a fairly attractive environment for making simple games in Python. In just an afternoon, I coded a simple mpeg player with custom controls, and am now working on a version of the classic Spacewar! game, which I anticipate should
take me another day or two. Fun stuff, screenshots to follow soon!
Daily Archives: 9/16/2002
AES Broken?
I subscribe to Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram newsletter, because I have mostly passing interest in things having to do with cryptography. Today’s included a rather startling revelation:
AES may have been broken.
Bruce’s description of the work is intriguing, but it is far from clear whether this break is of more than strictly theoretical interest. Bruce says:
So, here’s the current scorecard. Courtois and Pieprzyk claim a 2^100-ish attack against AES. They claim a 2^200-ish attack against Serpent. This is an enormously big deal.
Assuming that it’s real.
No doubt more revelations to come in the future. I’m not throwing away my 3DES code just yet. :