Snake Oil Crypto Competition

The Snake Oil Competition (SOC) is an effort organized to identify new craptographic schemes in order to improve on the state-of-the-art, and to encourage the use of snake oil cryptography. Snake Oil cryptography is widely used in practice, but recent events show that more research is urgently needed to fill much needed gaps in the field.

The winner(s) will be invited to a special edition of the Journal of Craptology (JoC). The first prize is a bottle of premium snake oil, and 100 trillion ZWR (Third Zimbabwean Dollar), equivalent to 10²⁷ ZWD (First Zimbabwean Dollar). The loser will also be invited to the JoC.

The competition is dedicated to Emperor Alexander and its Information Dominance Center.

We have received our first submissions!!!!! Thank you for making this competition a great success!

We are proud to announce that the NSA has not interfered with this competition in any way since last Tuesday (dead-man's switch).

The SOC competition has been awarded the Cryptography Competition of the year Award!

Candidates

The submissions received so far are listed here.

Submission guidelines

The competition is open to snake oil primitives, modes of operation, cryptanalitic techniques, evaluation methodologies, and random numbers. Original or non-original designs are accepted.

Submission should be written in English or Parseltongue. The submission document must provides proof or arguments (convincing if possible) for any claims.

NSA submissions must include a 10 million USD donation to cover committe members expenses.

Security requirements:

• Brute-forcing the key should be hard.
• Distinguishing the C code from randomly generated code should be hard.
• The cipher should run in a finite amount of time on most inputs (security proofs are a plus).
• Security against some known and/or unknown attacks.
• The cipher must make the user feel secure.

Potential extra features (worth extra points)

• Decryption being correct most of the time.
• NSA endorsing your design.
• Implementations on a wide range of platforms (e.g. Colossus or PDP-11).
• Patents.
• Protection against front-channel attacks.
• Paying companies to deploy your design.
• Master keys stored on an internet-connected machine.
• Inventing original backdoors.
• Synergetic and multidisciplinary designs.
• Published at TCC.
• Protection against cash attacks.
• Proof of knowledge of backdoor.
• Protection against decryption misuse.
• Zero-accuracy proof of security.

Reference platform: Pentium II MMX.

Reference designs: Dual_EC, ROT13.

The following submissions will be arbitrarly rejected:

• Chaos based cryptography.
• Submissions form Joan Daemen and/or Vincent Rijmen (they already master the art of snake oil, and have won enough competitions).
• Designs based on Serpent or the Cobra family.

Submission must be sent by postal mail, printed on pink elephant sized paper. The accompanying code should be on a floppy disc (5¼" is preferred). Alternatively, send an email to submit(at)snakeoil.cr.yp.to, and the NSA will inform us about any message sent there.

Tentative schedule:

Q1 2014

Announcing the competition, going online. Setting dead-line to Q3 2014 (Crypto rump session).

Q2 2014

Call for submission published (FSE rump session). Postponing the dead-line to Q4 2014 (Asiacrypt rump session).

Q3 2014

Moving back the dead-line to Q2 2014 (make up complaints).

Q4 2014

Open website for submission.

Q5 2014

Asking for comments about the call for submission.

Q0 2015

Tweaks.

Q1 2015

Real dead-line.

Q2 2015

Candidate workshop (collocated with Eurovision).

Q3 2015

NSA to submit secret comments.

Q4 2015

Leaking NSA secret comments.

Q5 2015

Announcing the winner(s).

Q1 2016

Trying to change winner's parameters.

Q2 2016

Changing winner's parameters to default ones.

Q3 2016

Retraction of the idea to change parameters.

Q5 2016

Standartization to end.

Q7 2016

Adding a missing rotate left by 1 instruction to standard.

Tentative dead-line: FSE 2015 rump session.

Selection committee

The selection will be made by a random oracle, and the task of the selection committee will be to find some rationale to justify the oracle decision. The voting process will use Helios.

Selection committee:

• Bart Preneel (President in charge of undecidability)
• Céline Blondeau (Treasurer of the State)
• D. Julius B. (CAESAR)
• Edward Snowden (Honorary member)
• Gaëtan Leurent (Secretary of the State)
• Greg Rose (Fleet Admiral)
• Keith Alexander (Emperor)
• Kenny Patterson (Head of Typograpy)
• Kevin Igoe (Co-chair for life)
• Orr Dunkelman (Minister of silly talks)
• Roberto Avanzi (Chief procrastinator — starting tomorrow)
• Simon Speck (NSA liaison)
• Stefan Lucks (CTO)
• Tanja Lange (Medusa oil drilling)

Members of the selection committee are expected to submit at least one design. Conflicts of interest are encouraged.

Support

The competition is supported by the Journal of Craptology. We would like to thank Schloss Dagstuhl for hosting the kickoff meeting.

The following companies and organizations do not support this competition (we assume they already have enough snake oil or other sources):

• Amazon
• AMD
• ANSI
• ANSSI
• ANSSSI
• Apple
• BSI
• CISCO
• Cryptography research Inc.
• Cryptologic
• DCSSI
• Dell
• D-wave
• Facebook
• FortressGB
• FSB
• GCHQ
• Google
• Helios
• Hewlett-Packard
• Hitachi
• Huawei
• IACR
• ID Quantique
• IEEE
• IETF
• Intel
• Juniper
• KGB
• Microsoft
• NSA (dead-man's switch)
• NSA (they should pay twice)
• Oracle
• Qualcomm
• RIM
• RSA
• Symantec
• Seagate/Maxtor
• Springer
• Twitter
• Synaptic Labs
• Western Digital
• Yahoo!

Please sponsor us if you want your company removed from this list. If your competitors are not listed, they probably support this competition already.

Contact

General comments: committee(at)snakeoil.cr.yp.to

Bribes: treasurer(at)snakeoil.cr.yp.to

Email received at those address will be shared at our discretion.