GCHQ has released new images of the WWII Colossus code-breaking computer, celebrating the machine’s eightieth anniversary (birthday?). News article. Powered by WPeMatico
Category: cryptography
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We don’t have a useful quantum computer yet, but we do have quantum algorithms. Shor’s algorithm has the potential to factor large numbers faster than otherwise possible, which—if the run times are actually feasible—could break both the RSA and Diffie-Hellman public-key algorithms. Now, computer scientist Oded Regev has a significant speed-up to Shor’s algorithm, at … Read More “Improving Shor’s Algorithm” »
This is interesting: For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that a large portion of cryptographic keys used to protect data in computer-to-server SSH traffic are vulnerable to complete compromise when naturally occurring computational errors occur while the connection is being established. […] The vulnerability occurs when there are errors during the signature generation that … Read More “New SSH Vulnerability” »
This is a fun challenge: The NIST elliptic curves that power much of modern cryptography were generated in the late ’90s by hashing seeds provided by the NSA. How were the seeds generated? Rumor has it that they are in turn hashes of English sentences, but the person who picked them, Dr. Jerry Solinas, passed … Read More “Bounty to Recover NIST’s Elliptic Curve Seeds” »
Jake Appelbaum’s PhD thesis contains several new revelations from the classified NSA documents provided to journalists by Edward Snowden. Nothing major, but a few more tidbits. Kind of amazing that that all happened ten years ago. At this point, those documents are more historical than anything else. And it’s unclear who has those archives anymore. … Read More “New Revelations from the Snowden Documents” »
I just read an article complaining that NIST is taking too long in finalizing its post-quantum-computing cryptography standards. This process has been going on since 2016, and since that time there has been a huge increase in quantum technology and an equally large increase in quantum understanding and interest. Yet seven years later, we have … Read More “You Can’t Rush Post-Quantum-Computing Cryptography Standards” »
Seems that there is a deliberate backdoor in the twenty-year-old TErrestrial Trunked RAdio (TETRA) standard used by police forces around the world. The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), an organization that standardizes technologies across the industry, first created TETRA in 1995. Since then, TETRA has been used in products, including radios, sold by Motorola, Airbus, … Read More “Backdoor in TETRA Police Radios” »
New research suggests that AIs can produce perfectly secure steganographic images: Abstract: Steganography is the practice of encoding secret information into innocuous content in such a manner that an adversarial third party would not realize that there is hidden meaning. While this problem has classically been studied in security literature, recent advances in generative models … Read More “AI-Generated Steganography” »
CRYSTALS-Kyber is one of the public-key algorithms currently recommended by NIST as part of its post-quantum cryptography standardization process. Researchers have just published a side-channel attack—using power consumption—against an implementation of the algorithm that was supposed to be resistant against that sort of attack. The algorithm is not “broken” or “cracked”—despite headlines to the contrary—this … Read More “Side-Channel Attack against CRYSTALS-Kyber” »
This is a neat piece of historical research. The team of computer scientist George Lasry, pianist Norbert Biermann and astrophysicist Satoshi Tomokiyo—all keen cryptographers—initially thought the batch of encoded documents related to Italy, because that was how they were filed at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. However, they quickly realised the letters were in French. … Read More “Mary Queen of Scots Letters Decrypted” »