Talk:Block cipher/Draft

Questions for editors

I'm not sure how large this page should get. Things like the Feistel structure and cipher modes might be explained here, but my guess is they need their own pages. Some of the design considerations might be covered here, or in cipher, cryptography, or cryptology, perhaps even in articles on the attacks they prevent. My guess is those should be here, at least in outline, with details under specific attacks. Comment, anyone? Sandy Harris 09:24, 7 September 2008 (CDT)

I'm now fairly happy with Block_cipher#Principles_and_techniques; I think all that needs adding there is more detail on S-boxes. Do that, and flesh out various later sections and we should have a decent article.

Various questions arise, though. Most of them could also be asked about Stream cipher. First of course, criticism is needed; what have I missed or got wrong? Contributions would also be great.

What goes here and what in related articles? Mostly, I'm just writing it here if the related article does not yet exist; if we end up with too much detail for here, we can always start the related article by moving the excess text. I'm trying to just cover the basics here, but there are a lot of basics.

In some cases, it is not clear what a related article should be called; "MARS", "Serpent" and "Hasty Pudding" are all names of ciphers. Should the article be Serpent cipher, Serpent (cryptography) or what? IBM call theirs "MARS", all uppercase [1]; what do we call an article? GOST is an abbreviation of something-or-other in Russian, and there's both a GOST cipher and a GOST hash.

How should links be set up? Various other articles have Feistel cipher as a link, but that is not written yet. Change those to point to Block_cipher#Feistel_structure? Move or copy my text to Feistel cipher? Or (my preference) create Feistel cipher as a redirect pointing into this article?

Did that. Still wonder about policy, though. Sandy Harris 10:01, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

How should links work within an article? I've consistently done it with internal links; every link to "DES" is to "#DES", the article's DES section, except for a link in that section pointing out to the main DES article. This seems right to me; keep the reader here, at the same level of detail, unless he actually asks for more. What do editors thnk, and is there a policy on this? Sandy Harris 06:11, 25 October 2008 (UTC)