Jim Sanborn, who designed the Kryptos sculpture in a CIA courtyard, has released another clue to the still-unsolved part 4. I think he’s getting tired of waiting. Did we mention Mr. Sanborn is 74? Holding on to one of the world’s most enticing secrets can be stressful. Some would-be codebreakers have appeared at his home. … Read More “A New Clue for the Kryptos Sculpture” »
Category: cryptography
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Artist Katie Holten has developed a tree code (basically, a font in trees), and New York City is using it to plant secret messages in parks. Powered by WPeMatico
Yesterday’s Microsoft Windows patches included a fix for a critical vulnerability in the system’s crypto library. A spoofing vulnerability exists in the way Windows CryptoAPI (Crypt32.dll) validates Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) certificates. An attacker could exploit the vulnerability by using a spoofed code-signing certificate to sign a malicious executable, making it appear the file was … Read More “Critical Windows Vulnerability Discovered by NSA” »
There’s a new, practical, collision attack against SHA-1: In this paper, we report the first practical implementation of this attack, and its impact on real-world security with a PGP/GnuPG impersonation attack. We managed to significantly reduce the complexity of collisions attack against SHA-1: on an Nvidia GTX 970, identical-prefix collisions can now be computed with … Read More “New SHA-1 Attack” »
This just in: We are pleased to announce the factorization of RSA-240, from RSA’s challenge list, and the computation of a discrete logarithm of the same size (795 bits): RSA-240 = 12462036678171878406583504460810659043482037465167880575481878888328 966680118821085503603957027250874750986476843845862105486553797025393057189121 768431828636284694840530161441643046806687569941524699318570418303051254959437 1372159029236099 = 509435952285839914555051023580843714132648382024111473186660296521821206469746 700620316443478873837606252372049619334517 * 244624208838318150567813139024002896653802092578931401452041221336558477095178 155258218897735030590669041302045908071447 […] The previous records were RSA-768 (768 bits) in December 2009 [2], and a … Read More “RSA-240 Factored” »
Really interesting research: TPM-FAIL: TPM meets Timing and Lattice Attacks, by Daniel Moghimi, Berk Sunar, Thomas Eisenbarth, and Nadia Heninger. Abstract: Trusted Platform Module (TPM) serves as a hardware-based root of trust that protects cryptographic keys from privileged system and physical adversaries. In this work, we per-form a black-box timing analysis of TPM 2.0 devices … Read More “TPM-Fail Attacks Against Cryptographic Coprocessors” »
In an extraordinary essay, the former FBI general counsel Jim Baker makes the case for strong encryption over government-mandated backdoors: In the face of congressional inaction, and in light of the magnitude of the threat, it is time for governmental authorities — including law enforcement — to embrace encryption because it is one of the … Read More “Former FBI General Counsel Jim Baker Chooses Encryption Over Backdoors” »
The US Department of Justice unraveled a dark web child-porn website, leading to the arrest of 337 people in at least 18 countries. This was all accomplished not through any backdoors in communications systems, but by analyzing the bitcoin transactions and following the money: Welcome to Video made money by charging fees in bitcoin, and … Read More “Dark Web Site Taken Down without Breaking Encryption” »
There was a successful attack against NordVPN: Based on the command log, another of the leaked secret keys appeared to secure a private certificate authority that NordVPN used to issue digital certificates. Those certificates might be issued for other servers in NordVPN’s network or for a variety of other sensitive purposes. The name of the … Read More “NordVPN Breached” »
NIST has completed a study — it was published last year, but I just saw it recently — calculating the costs and benefits of the Advanced Encryption Standard. From the conclusion: The result of performing that operation on the series of cumulated benefits extrapolated for the 169 survey respondents finds that present value of benefits … Read More “Calculating the Benefits of the Advanced Encryption Standard” »