crypto basics

[Damian Gerow <damian@sentex.net>]

After following the brief discussion this morning about Blowfish, Twofish, 
Serpent, and AES, I've realized that I don't know nearly what I had hoped I 
did when it came to encryption.  Does anyone have a link (or a document 
they can post on the web) that points to the basics of encryption?  And I 
don't mean like 'Encryption is when you take what you wrote (plaintext) and 
enrypt it so that nobody can read it (ciphertext).'  I'm looking for 
something a little more advanced -- that would explain block sizes, CBC, 
EBC, and their relative strengths and weaknesses.

And (what I'd really like to see) does anyone know of a complete rundown of 
all the ciphers that are available in the kernel?  The help was just enough 
to whet my appetite -- and I'm really curious to see why AES is ... not 
well liked.

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Linux-crypto:  cryptography in and on the Linux system
Archive:       http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-crypto/