Many embedded systems depend on obscurity to achieve security. We often design systems to download unsigned or unencrypted firmware upgrades or store unencrypted user data, a practice we justify ...

Blowfish is a variable-length, symmetric, 64-bit block cipher. Designed by Bruce Schneier in 1993 as a "general-purpose algorithm," it was intended to provide a fast, free, drop-in alternative to the ...

In the early days of Unix, the DES-based algorithm used to encrypt (actually, to generate hashes from) passwords was considered to be quite secure. Hashing a password took a significant fraction of a ...

Of course, firmware upgrades and data logs are seldom exactly 64 bits in length. To encrypt long strings of data using Blowfish, carve the message up into 64-bit blocks, encrypt each block and save ...