This is a newly unclassified NSA history of its reaction to academic cryptography in the 1970s: “NSA Comes Out of the Closet: The Debate over Public Cryptography in the Inman Era,” Cryptographic Quarterly, Spring 1996, author still classified. Powered by WPeMatico
Category: cryptography
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I have been seeing this paper by cryptographer Peter Schnorr making the rounds: “Fast Factoring Integers by SVP Algorithms.” It describes a new factoring method, and its abstract ends with the provocative sentence: “This destroys the RSA cryptosystem.” It does not. At best, it’s an improvement in factoring — and I’m not sure it’s even … Read More “No, RSA Is Not Broken” »
The US Cyber Command has released a series of ten Valentine’s Day “Cryptography Challenge Puzzles.” Slashdot thread. Reddit thread. (And here’s the archived link, in case Cyber Command takes the page down.) Powered by WPeMatico
DiceKeys is a physical mechanism for creating and storing a 192-bit key. The idea is that you roll a special set of twenty-five dice, put them into a plastic jig, and then use an app to convert those dice into a key. You can then use that key for a variety of purposes, and regenerate … Read More “DiceKeys” »
Mike Stay broke an old zipfile encryption algorithm to recover $300,000 in bitcoin. DefCon talk here. Powered by WPeMatico
NIST has posted an update on their post-quantum cryptography program: After spending more than three years examining new approaches to encryption and data protection that could defeat an assault from a quantum computer, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has winnowed the 69 submissions it initially received down to a final group of … Read More “Update on NIST’s Post-Quantum Cryptography Program” »
The NSA’s Central Security Service — that’s the part that’s supposed to work on defense — has released two documents (a full and an abridged version) on securing virtual private networks. Some of it is basic, but it contains good information. Maintaining a secure VPN tunnel can be complex and requires regular maintenance. To maintain … Read More “NSA on Securing VPNs” »
Obituary. Powered by WPeMatico
This one is from the Netherlands. It seems to be clever cryptanalysis rather than a backdoor. The Dutch intelligence service has been able to read encrypted communications from dozens of countries since the late 1970s thanks to a microchip, according to research by de Volkskrant on Thursday. The Netherlands could eavesdrop on confidential communication from … Read More “Another Story of Bad 1970s Encryption” »
RSA-250 has been factored. This computation was performed with the Number Field Sieve algorithm, using the open-source CADO-NFS software. The total computation time was roughly 2700 core-years, using Intel Xeon Gold 6130 CPUs as a reference (2.1GHz): RSA-250 sieving: 2450 physical core-years RSA-250 matrix: 250 physical core-years The computation involved tens of thousands of machines … Read More “RSA-250 Factored” »