[ksenzee]

Do you mean “simpler” or do you mean “more accurate”? I’m quite willing to accept your explanation as more accurate, but it is not simpler, at least if you don’t know much about modern cryptography. To understand the article, all I needed was some algebra. I think my 13-year-old could mostly get it. To try to understand your second paragraph here, I’ve spent about fifteen minutes so far looking things up (starting with the definition of “block cipher” and ending somewhere about halfway through the Wikipedia article on AES) and I have a sense of its meaning in the abstract, but if there’s a quiz tomorrow I’m in trouble.

If you really were going for “simpler” rather than “more accurate” then I regret to inform you that you have joined the “monoid in the category of endofunctors” guy in room 2501 of the xkcd building.

[tptacek]

Both, I think? There's no way around having to learn about block cryptography, and trying to learn specifically about cryptographic hash functions without learning how a cipher works seems like a bad plan. You get these huge visualizations of the internals of SHA2 or whatever and then attempts to explain every operation in them, most of which are missing the core abstraction those operations were designed around; it's like recapitulating a block cipher from first principles.