A Coordinated Bitcoin Selloff

It appears that it was a coordinated action planned many days in advance. Without doubt also related to coronovirus. We looked at the crypto index CMC200 and CMC200 without bitcoin which are volume weighted average price synthetic indices, now present in the mainstream with Nasdaq, Bloomberg, Reuters, Yahoo etc. Both indices culminated on 14 February 2020. In …

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Can the Internet become Unstoppable?

There is a chance the the Internet will be completely transformed. One wind of change blows from blockchain tech community. Another from Communist China. Essentially all the technology we know, could disappear completely, and could be replaced by something completely different, a different set of protocols and systems. For decades the so called “Internet” was …

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What is the Purpose of REF?

Today, Jo Grady, general secretary of my university trade Union (UCU) wrote these words to all academic staff who are members of the union: “we are asking you to withdraw, where possible, from activities relating to the REF […] […]   These activities are important to employers but they damage our sector. They rely on inappropriate …

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30 Years Ago

Exactly 30 years ago, Stasi was dissolved. 13 January 1990. 91,000 full time employees and 189,000 unofficial collaborators and informants lost their jobs and privileges. The German government has done a lot to preserve anything which Stasi has ever done. Some links: At this moment in Brussels, inside the EU Parliament there is an exposition on this …

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A New Documentary about WW2 Cryptanalysis of Enigma

A new documentary tells the story of the discovery of one of the most important cryptography papers of all times. We are talking about an extensive technical report written in German language and entitled “Kurzgefasste Darstellung der Auflösungsmethoden”. For some 80 years it has remained classified, part of the so called Gustave Bertrand WW2 archives. It was …

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A Linear Annihilator Property and Strong Biases with Original DES S-boxes

In 2004 I have published a paper [Crypto 2004, Santa Barbara] in which I explain the concept of the so called Bi-Linear attack on DES. The old attack was not extremely strong. It is possible to see that two conditions would be necessary for such an attack to somewhat work well in cryptanalysis of DES: There …

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A New Attack on Data Encryption Standard (DES)

There is abundant literature on the security of Data Encryption Standard (DES or 3DES). Today we have released a new way to attack this cipher, see Section 11 in here. Anyone who reads this paper should immediately see that the high confidence which have developed over decades in research community about our ability to design secure block …

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