In his 2008 white paper that first proposed bitcoin, the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto concluded with: “We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust.” He was referring to blockchain, the system behind bitcoin cryptocurrency. The circumvention of trust is a great promise, but it’s just not true. Yes, bitcoin eliminates certain trusted … Read More “Blockchain and Trust” »
Category: cryptography
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Last week, Australia passed a law giving the government the ability to demand backdoors in computers and communications systems. Details are still to be defined, but it’s really bad. Note: Many people e-mailed me to ask why I haven’t blogged this yet. One, I was busy with other things. And two, there’s nothing I can … Read More “New Australian Backdoor Law” »
Earlier this year, the US Department of Justice made a series of legal arguments as to why Facebook should be forced to help the government wiretap Facebook Messenger. Those arguments are still sealed. The ACLU is suing to make them public. Powered by WPeMatico
Sotheby’s is auctioning off a (working, I think) three-rotor Enigma machine today. They’re expecting it to sell for about $200K. I have an Enigma, but it’s missing the rotors. Powered by WPeMatico
Earlier this month, I wrote about a statement by the Five Eyes countries about encryption and back doors. (Short summary: they like them.) One of the weird things about the statement is that it was clearly written from a law-enforcement perspective, though we normally think of the Five Eyes as a consortium of intelligence agencies. … Read More “More on the Five Eyes Statement on Encryption and Backdoors” »
This is interesting research: “On the Security of the PKCS#1 v1.5 Signature Scheme“: Abstract: The RSA PKCS#1 v1.5 signature algorithm is the most widely used digital signature scheme in practice. Its two main strengths are its extreme simplicity, which makes it very easy to implement, and that verification of signatures is significantly faster than for … Read More “Evidence for the Security of PKCS #1 Digital Signatures” »
Lots of people are e-mailing me about this new result on the distribution of prime numbers. While interesting, it has nothing to do with cryptography. Cryptographers aren’t interested in how to find prime numbers, or even in the distribution of prime numbers. Public-key cryptography algorithms like RSA get their security from the difficulty of factoring … Read More “New Findings About Prime Number Distribution Almost Certainly Irrelevant to Cryptography” »
NIST has released a new study concluding that the AES encryption standard has resulted in a $250-billion worldwide economic benefit over the past 20 years. I have no idea how to even begin to assess the quality of the study and its conclusions — it’s all in the 150-page report, though — but I do … Read More “AES Resulted in a $250-Billion Economic Benefit” »
Quantum computing is a new way of computing — one that could allow humankind to perform computations that are simply impossible using today’s computing technologies. It allows for very fast searching, something that would break some of the encryption algorithms we use today. And it allows us to easily factor large numbers, something that would … Read More “Quantum Computing and Cryptography” »
The UK’s GCHQ delivers a brutally blunt assessment of quantum key distribution: QKD protocols address only the problem of agreeing keys for encrypting data. Ubiquitous on-demand modern services (such as verifying identities and data integrity, establishing network sessions, providing access control, and automatic software updates) rely more on authentication and integrity mechanisms — such as … Read More “GCHQ on Quantum Key Distribution” »