The White House has appointed a well known crypto currency expert Ed Felten from Princeton University Computer Science department. This is a good sign, this means that an informed scientific debate, intellectual honesty and common sense have a chance to survive in the crypto currency world. I have started to doubt about it. Felten has many …
On the V-Day and the 70th anniversary of defeating the Nazi Germany, we need to remember how much this victory was owed to code breakers at Bletchley Park and elsewhere. UCL code breaking competition On this day it is my pleasure to announce the winners of the 2015 UCL Code Breaking competition. The winners are: Joint …
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New paper in a series of how to solve Elliptic Curve Discrete Log Problem (ECDLP) in characteristic 2 with sub-exponential complexity. More results on this topic are expected. Remark: it seems to me that the main assumption about degree falls and solvability which is at the heart of this paper, is simply entirely wrong. Recent developments: …
The final report can be found here. The report identifies 4 major vulnerabilities, 2 of them are judged of high severity and are as follows: The most commonly used windows versions of TrueCrypt were found to have a specific problem with calling the function CryptAcquireContext which is used in Truecrypt exclusively for the purpose of …
Recent revelations report how NSA and GCHQ have illegally obtained billions of encryption keys for cellular networks. In particular keys have been stolen from Gemalto through implants and by intercepting emails. The market cap of Gemalto have suffered a serious drop. Gemalto denies that cryptographic keys could have been stolen. If so, this was many years ago …
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Another theft in a series: nearly 2 millions of dollars are missing from the BTER exchange. A specific transaction created by the thief can be found here. The theft took place on 14 Feb 2015. [added later] Another theft of some 250,000 USD has occurred at another Chinese exchange on 27 Jan 2015. Here some Internet posts …
Bruce Schneier has discovered that machines could break the law and this will break our legal system which will be totally unable to stop the crime from happening. Many years ago when teaching computer security at UCL, I made another prediction: A Turing machine could be made illegal in the future. The modern version of this …
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More than 100,000 individuals who have dissimulated their money have been reported to the competent authorities. This is responsible, selective disclosure. Not everything is disclosed. A small glimpse can be found here Can technology help? YES. Potentially blockchain technology and fancy cryptography could propose some solutions. Basically they may render regulation, transparency and accounting rules possible to enforce …
Continue reading ‘Monumental Investigative Work of 154 Journalists in 47 Countries’ »
A wind of change is blowing inside the bitcoin community. For many many years the dominant ideology in bitcoin community was that open source software such as bitcoin is “secure”, and that you need to trust the infinite wisdom of the crowd who will find all the bugs and fix them, the wisdom of the …
Continue reading ‘The Era of Irresponsibility Is Coming to An End?’ »
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