What I've been up to for the past few days
Well, actually, a whole lot of stuff, including spending some time with klicrai and someone who tends to go by Crymerci online, but doesn't have an active LJ.
But, the topic of this LJ entry is the work I've been doing on creating a nice C++ interface for Skein, Bruce Schneier and friends entry into the NIST SHA-3 competition.
Anyway, I'm basing my work on the code in their NIST submission. And, as I said before, it's a nice C++ wrapper for Skein that attempts to give access to all of Skein's nifty features that are in excess of the NIST requirements. It's a hash function, it's a PRNG, it's a MAC algorithm! No, it's Skein!
One kind of gets the impression that Bruce and company are miffed by the fact that Rijndael was chosen over Twofish for the AES competition. And their response was to create a new algorithm that was faster, probably more secure, inordinately flexible and impossible to level the "it's too complicated to analyze effectively" criticism against. That criticism was one of the reasons Twofish wasn't selected in the AES competition.