Breaking news: the cryptography that we all know and use, such AES-128, SHA-1 and SHA-256, RSA/DH, and the most commonly used elliptic curve P-256 (a.k.a. secp256r1) are NO LONGER wholeheartedly supported by the NSA. In fact most of these, if not all, are not quite recommended anymore. Until now and for the last 10+ years the NSA and the …
Continue reading ‘NSA Plans To Retire Current Cryptography Standards’ »
20 million dollars have just been invested in BitFury (July 2015), totaling 60 million which this company has raised (source: coindesk). There was nothing like this for at least 5 months. On Mining Profitability I find it very surprising that people invest in bitcoin mining. Why? My [private] conjecture is as follows: mining …
Two prominent bitcoin gurus Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn decided to release their own software distribution of bitcoin and ALTER the specification of bitcoin! There will be a possibility to mine blocks with a new version number and new rules. This is meant to make bitcoin more democratic: larger blocks, more transactions per second, lower fees, wider …
Ground breaking research on insecurity of brainwallets by Ryan Castellucci was presented at DefCon 2015 on 7 August 2015: At least 733 BTC (about 200,000 USD) was at one time (more or less recently) exposed to immediate theft. Many very complex passwords such as “No need to worry, my accountant handles that” already cracked. A …
Continue reading ‘At Least 200,000 USD in Bitcoins Exposed to Theft Due to Usage of Brainwallets’ »
An interesting paper on the state of InfoSec apathy in which we have lived for too long now. Some citations: “[…]stop buying from vendors who don’t have a strong public – and practical – commitment to security”. “We need to show that we will use our wallets with …
A price increase in bitcoin was expected after the Greek crisis. HOWEVER. Greek economy is not that big and modern bitcoin market is nowadays driven primarily by China. There seem to be some permanent price difference on exchanges: like Chinese people are buying bitcoins against Chinese Yuan paying some 6% more, see here, and getting out US …
Open source security software also helps criminals. For example TrueCrypt being free and easy to modify has lowered entry barriers for establishing criminal and cyber-espionnage operations (the same applies, well to Bitcoin software!). Example: Operation Potato Express. A fully functional clone of TrueCrypt was since at least 2011 distributed from Russian web sites such as …
Researchers at UCL and in the US claim that the current systems for e-government citizen/user authentication (for example when dealing with taxes or public services), are deeply FLAWED. The main issue raised is that the current systems which are under roll-out in the UK and the US are very poorly engineered with respect to central server/hub …
Continue reading ‘Should One Be Able to Undetectably Impersonate Citizens?’ »
I was a panellist at 2 Day Event in London, Mon-Tue 15-16 JUNE, Millennium Hotel, Mayfair, London, cf. here. My favourite talk was a talk by Aral Balkan about the 85, human-enslaving ideology emanating from Silicon Valley, design vs. decoration, the institutional corruption, human rights, democracy, and how can we cope to regain some of our lost …
An unprecedented milestone result in cryptography was achieved by researchers at University of Birmingham. They have build a TIME release encryption system based on the bitcoin network. In their protocol it is possible to release a certain document in the future in such a way that it CANNOT be read earlier. The new protocol relies on …