Enigma cipher machines are rare collector items which are worth a small fortune. It is estimated that at least 50,000 Enigma machines have been manufactured during the WW2. Some Enigma machines are more exceptional than other, as there are much fewer of them left. When Polish code breakers went to France after Poland was overrun by …
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I have worked for several years in bitcoin community. In May 2014 I have published a paper in which I formulated the theory of programmed self-destruction of crypto currency. Few points about this My conclusion was that many crypto currencies were genetically programmed or bound to self-destruct. This is absolutely certain. Not because they were …
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I have spend a few recent days at 2015 CCC congress in Hamburg. CCC is the biggest security conference in Europe with 12,000 participants, and potentially more [tickets were sold out]. Most talks I have attended were really good! 90% are really excellent. CCC is IMHO also the best security conference in Europe. A place like …
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10 bitcoins (nearly 4000 USD) is offered for help with breaks, cryptanalysis, security proofs, analysis or improvements relating to the CCT protocol which aims at making the amounts of bitcoin transactions confidential with a dedicated efficient zero-knowledge method. The timing is tight: the price expires on 20 of January. Additional cash prizes, …
A recent paper from September 2015 revisits a simple [well-known] attack in which a government agency manipulates elliptic curves under the assumption that there exists (a secret) method such that a certain proportion (say 1 in a million of 1 in a thousand) of curves are weak and breakable. No convincing method to create a weak …
Microsoft have released a new free ECC library which is up to 5x faster than with the traditional elliptic curve P-256 (which was so far the most commonly used curve in practical applications) and a also up to 3x faster than a well-known alternative Curve25519. Bitcoin elliptic curve belongs to the category “special therefore suspicious” and have been …
Edward Lucas wrote a nice piece on how businesses can dramatically improve their cyber-security. He says that: “Well-run organisations will stop using passwords and logins in 2016. Instead they will use identifiers that are harder to copy, fake, steal or guess […] Security questions will stop being […] “mother’s maiden name”. Instead they will ask …
According to BBC and many other sources, islamic state terrorists use a messaging app called Telegram to encrypt communications for groups of users. On the surface, Telegram developers seem to support high security standards: they have published the spec and API and funded in November 2014 a handsome 300,000 USD cash prize for cracking …
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Some work done at UCL regarding bitcoin and speed: HOW to crack bitcoin passwords at a very high speed: brainflayer cracker where we read that: “The bulk of Brainflayer was written by Ryan Castellucci. Nicolas Courtois and Guangyan Song contributed the code in ec_pubkey_fast.c which more than doubles the speed of public key computations compared with …
A so called Bitcoin Generator Tool v.2.9 have been released today (Sat 3 Oct 2015) and already 260 downloads within a few hours! It is a ZIP file which claims that it performs full access on the Bitcoin central SQL database and allows one to add bitcoins to his account. Needless to say there is no such …
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