Legal Commentary

In Which I Am Falsely Accused of Understanding the Blowfish Algorithm

By Professor University of Miami School of Law

I have been cited in the Canadian Journal of Electrical and Electronics Engineering in an article entitled, Microcontroller Application in Cryptography Techniques, which appears at Vol. 1, No. 4, June 2010 and is by Ali E. Taki El Deen and Noha A. Hikal. Normally it warms the cockles of my heart to be cited by cryptographers. But not this time.

You see, the place where my article, The Metaphor is the Key: Cryptography, the Clipper Chip and the Constitution, 143 U. Penn. L. Rev. 709 (1995), was cited is this one:

The decryption process for Blowfish [8] is almost identical to the encryption
process except the P-array values are reversed.

[8] sends you to my article. The problem is, I wasn't aware I knew much about the Blowfish cipher, or that I had ever written about it.

There must be some mistake? A month ago I emailed the authors to ask, but so far no answer.

Full post as published by Discourse.net on August 22, 2010 (boomark / email).