Interesting symmetric cipher: LC4: Abstract: ElsieFour (LC4) is a low-tech cipher that can be computed by hand; but unlike many historical ciphers, LC4 is designed to be hard to break. LC4 is intended for encrypted communication between humans only, and therefore it encrypts and decrypts plaintexts and ciphertexts consisting only of the English letters A … Read More “LC4: Another Pen-and-Paper Cipher” »
Category: academicpapers
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Interesting research: “‘Won’t Somebody Think of the Children?’ Examining COPPA Compliance at Scale“: Abstract: We present a scalable dynamic analysis framework that allows for the automatic evaluation of the privacy behaviors of Android apps. We use our system to analyze mobile apps’ compliance with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), one of the few … Read More “COPPA Compliance” »
This is a really interesting research result. This paper proves that two parties can create a secure communications channel using a communications system with a backdoor. It’s a theoretical result, so it doesn’t talk about how easy that channel is to create. And the assumptions on the adversary are pretty reasonable: that each party can … Read More “Subverting Backdoored Encrryption” »
When Spectre and Meltdown were first announced earlier this year, pretty much everyone predicted that there would be many more attacks targeting branch prediction in microprocessors. Here’s another one: In the new attack, an attacker primes the PHT and running branch instructions so that the PHT will always assume a particular branch is taken or … Read More “Another Branch Prediction Attack” »
Researchers have exploited a flaw in the cryptocurrency Monero to break the anonymity of transactions. Research paper. BoingBoing post. Powered by WPeMatico
Ross Anderson has a really interesting paper on tracing stolen bitcoin. From a blog post: Previous attempts to track tainted coins had used either the “poison” or the “haircut” method. Suppose I open a new address and pay into it three stolen bitcoin followed by seven freshly-mined ones. Then under poison, the output is ten … Read More “Tracing Stolen Bitcoin” »
Yet another development in the arms race between facial recognition systems and facial-recognition-system foolers. BoingBoing post. Powered by WPeMatico
Interesting research into undetectably adding backdoors into computer chips during manufacture: “Stealthy dopant-level hardware Trojans: extended version,” also available here: Abstract: In recent years, hardware Trojans have drawn the attention of governments and industry as well as the scientific community. One of the main concerns is that integrated circuits, e.g., for military or critical-infrastructure applications, … Read More “Adding Backdoors at the Chip Level” »
Interesting paper “A first look at browser-based cryptojacking“: Abstract: In this paper, we examine the recent trend towards in-browser mining of cryptocurrencies; in particular, the mining of Monero through Coinhive and similar code-bases. In this model, a user visiting a website will download a JavaScript code that executes client-side in her browser, mines a cryptocurrency, … Read More “Hijacking Computers for Cryptocurrency Mining” »
Seems like everyone is writing about encryption and backdoors this season. “Policy Approaches to the Encryption Debate,” R Street Policy Study #133, by Charles Duan, Arthur Rizer, Zach Graves and Mike Godwin. “Encryption Policy in Democratic Regimes,” East West Institute. I recently blogged about the new National Academies report on the same topic. Here’s a … Read More “Two New Papers on the Encryption Debate” »