Bitcoin Crazy Ride Hits Wall Street

It is a big success for bitcoin and coincides with an incredible price rally where bitcoin has accomplished in 2017. In first days of 2017, bitcoin was worth 1000$. 5 months later in May it was at 2000$, 3 months later in August it was at 4000$, and after another 3 months in November it was at …

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XYZ and Saving an Extremely Rare Enigma Machine

Public donations are sought by Pilsudski Institute in London. The most prominent host of the institute is an extremely rare WW2 Enigma machine. This machine was made in France during WW2 to assist Polish code breakers in their daily code-breaking tasks [done in close collaboration with Bletchley Park, UK]. Only two such machines exist, see here …

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UCL InfoSec Visit at Bletchley Park – Friday 29 Sept 2017

Our trip took place 29 Sept 2017.  Some 32 UCL students participated. Students have explored the past in order to find role models for the future.           Due to large numbers, we have split into two groups for a guided Bletchley Park tour, and also had assisted at two bombe demonstrations. …

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Post-Quantum RSA

A very detailed study showing that RSA can be re-engineered in order to remain practical, yet it will no longer be broken by a quantum computer. The essence of the proposal is a multiple-prime RSA with great many 4096-bit primes and with 1 Terabyte public key. A significant potential weakness [for which however there is no …

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Silvio Micali – A Genius Which Will Stay in the Bottle

Silvio Micali, one of the most brilliant computer scientists on this planet has just re-invented democracy or blockchains or finance or law order and public authority and few other things, with his ALGORAND system. And some other brilliant crypto innovators are also doing the same thing: see DFINITY. Possibly this is what we really want, a …

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Interesting Parts in CIA Leaks

Schneier wrote: 8,761 classified CIA documents […] 2012-2016 […]it sounds like this cache of documents wasn’t taken from the CIA and given to WikiLeaks for publication, but has been passed around the community for a while — and incidentally some part of the cache was passed to WikiLeaks. […]  extraordinary collection […] several hundred million lines …

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Is PGP Bankrupt?

In the last few years, we have seen an increased awareness that PGP/GPG is a dinosaur of 1990s crypto, and it does not satisfy the need of modern users for secure communication. PGP model has many perverse effects: like creating a single point of failure where all sensitive communications are compromised with cracking one single …

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Blockchain Privacy – Part 2: Stealth Addresses

Privacy In Part 1 we covered why privacy is essential for widespread cryptocurrency adoption, and concluded that neither Bitcoin nor Ethereum, or even ZCash is suitable for the task we’re wanting to solve: anonymity with efficiency. (Also the bonus property of needing no trusted setup)! COOL THING 1: STEALTH ADDRESSES The benefits of using stealth …

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