Simply put, CryptoBench provides a source of strong cryptographic transformations to help in the cryptanalysis process of common cryptographic schemes.
If the previous sentence doesn't make much sense, you will probably find the software an odd Curiosity. Something worth tinkering with for a few moments and deleting later. However, in doing so, I hope to spark enough interest in the subject of cryptography so that you will continue experimenting. There are many websites with valuable information, and the search engine of your preference is likely to yield hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of links. Nevertheless a couple of good places to start are Introduction to Cryptography and the RSA Labs FAQ.
For the most part Modern cryptography is the domain of the numerical sciences, notably Discrete Mathematics, Statistics and Information Theory. Anyone seriously interested in this topic will undoubtedly benefit from academic training in those areas but, I think, their mastery isn't a sine qua non condition to get involved in this fascinating subject.
Overall, the process of cryptanalysis entails three steps: 1) identification of the cryptographic Algorithm, 2) recovery of encryption keys and 3) reconstruction of the PlainText. Most of the available literature centers around the second step but, to my knowledge, there is very Little material regarding fingerprinting an encryption scheme based on ciphertext only. That's the subject of my (hobby) research and that's what ultimately led me to develop CryptoBench, since I couldn't find a freely available software that will provide multiple encryption algorithms and allow for low level control of the encryption parameters.
Developing good cryptographic software is hard -very hard- so, if CryptoBench works it's because of Wei Dai's Crypto++ library. When it doesn't, it's most likely my fault.
