My Applied Cryptography is on a list of books banned in Oregon prisons. It’s not me — and it’s not cryptography — it’s that the prisons ban books that teach people to code. The subtitle is “Algorithms, Protocols, and Source Code in C” — and that’s the reason. My more recent Cryptography Engineering is a … Read More “Applied Cryptography is Banned in Oregon Prisons” »
Category: cryptography
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Google has released an open-source cryptographic tool: Private Join and Compute. From a Wired article: Private Join and Compute uses a 1970s methodology known as “commutative encryption” to allow data in the data sets to be encrypted with multiple keys, without it mattering which order the keys are used in. This is helpful for multiparty … Read More “Google Releases Basic Homomorphic Encryption Tool” »
Wow, is this an embarrassing bug: Yubico is recalling a line of security keys used by the U.S. government due to a firmware flaw. The company issued a security advisory today that warned of an issue in YubiKey FIPS Series devices with firmware versions 4.4.2 and 4.4.4 that reduced the randomness of the cryptographic keys … Read More “Yubico Security Keys with a Crypto Flaw” »
MongoDB now has the ability to encrypt data by field: MongoDB calls the new feature Field Level Encryption. It works kind of like end-to-end encrypted messaging, which scrambles data as it moves across the internet, revealing it only to the sender and the recipient. In such a “client-side” encryption scheme, databases utilizing Field Level Encryption … Read More “MongoDB Offers Field Level Encryption” »
Matthew Green intelligently speculates about how Apple’s new “Find My” feature works. If you haven’t already been inspired by the description above, let me phrase the question you ought to be asking: how is this system going to avoid being a massive privacy nightmare? Let me count the concerns: If your device is constantly emitting … Read More “How Apple’s “Find My” Feature Works” »
The term “fake news” has lost much of its meaning, but it describes a real and dangerous Internet trend. Because it’s hard for many people to differentiate a real news site from a fraudulent one, they can be hoodwinked by fictitious news stories pretending to be real. The result is that otherwise reasonable people believe … Read More “Fraudulent Academic Papers” »
Der Spiegel is reporting that the German Ministry for Internal Affairs is planning to require all Internet message services to provide plaintext messages on demand, basically outlawing strong end-to-end encryption. Anyone not complying will be blocked, although the article doesn’t say how. (Cory Doctorow has previously explained why this would be impossible.) The article is … Read More “Germany Talking about Banning End-to-End Encryption” »
A German auction house is selling an SG-41. It looks beautiful. Starting price is 75,000 euros. My guess is that it will sell for around 100K euros. Powered by WPeMatico
In March, Adi Shamir — that’s the “S” in RSA — was denied a US visa to attend the RSA Conference. He’s Israeli. This month, British citizen Ross Anderson couldn’t attend an awards ceremony in DC because of visa issues. (You can listen to his recorded acceptance speech.) I’ve heard of two other prominent cryptographers … Read More “Why Are Cryptographers Being Denied Entry into the US?” »
A pair of Russia-designed cryptographic algorithms — the Kuznyechik block cipher and the Streebog hash function — have the same flawed S-box that is almost certainly an intentional backdoor. It’s just not the kind of mistake you make by accident, not in 2014. Powered by WPeMatico
