Home Work After a bombe demonstration by a WW2 veteran Ruth Bourne and BP bombe experts, students have been asked to further study at home how Enigma was broken, see our hand-out. More details can be found in our teaching materials “Enigma and Block Ciphers – 100 years of cryptanalysis with non-commutative combinations …
Continue reading ‘UCL InfoSec Visit at Bletchley Park – 2 Oct 2016’ »
Tomorrow 20 July Ethereum are going to invalidate more than 50M$ worth of Ethereum stolen by some rogue hacker group. Congratulations to our community for this brave decision! Support for this decision must be shown by all honest citizens of crypto space by upgrading ASAP geth.exe and mist wallets to the new version, for example now, and …
Continue reading ‘Changing the Past of Ethereum – Not an Ordinary Divorce’ »
In a few minutes, cf. countdown, the amount of bitcoins attributed to each block mined will be divided by 2 in one single step. A rare event which happens once approximately every 4 years. This is an artificial shock which is tolerated by the bitcoin community in the name of misplaced ideology that whatever was decided …
Some 50 millions of dollars have been stolen from DAO token holders (including myself). The DAO is by the way, claimed to be closing [Tual]. Closing or not, it remains a smart contract which should allow DAO holders to get some of their initial ethers back. Now can the thief spend his Ethers without being caught (for now locked until 14 …
A major paper trying to explain why security experts have so frequently failed. Cormac Herley: The Unfalsifiability of Security Claims paper /slides. It starts with a great classic, Karl Popper philosophy of science which would be the basis to say “security” is some sort of pseudo-science. We read that “there is no empirical test that allows us …
For decades the dominant paradigm in crypto and security research would be: to claim that security vulnerabilities occur accidentally, ignoring major questions such as why there are so many of them and why the “bad scenarios” repeat so many times, concentrate security research on topics of secondary importance, or those which have no importance whatsoever and …
Continue reading ‘Researchers in Cryptography vs. Big Brother’ »
In the last 2 weeks it was possible to buy DAO tokens, a major new form of distributed business constructed to run on ETH blockchain. Until Friday 12 May 2016 some 50 M$ were invested. Then the price of these tokens has started raising [following the pre-determined rule] for the last 2 weeks of token …
On the V-Day and the 71st anniversary of defeating the Nazi Germany, we should remember how much the victory is owed to code breakers at Bletchley Park and elsewhere. 2016 UCL Code Breaking Competition (part of GA18). On this day it is my pleasure to announce the winners of the 2016 UCL Code Breaking competition. The winners …
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Today the Economist publishes a picture of Craig Wright, who decided to confirm and embrace the claim that he is the mysterious creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. The picture and the paper portrays a sad man who is badly struggling “to convince the world that he is indeed who he claims to be”. He also …
The press is full of reports about a new discovery about prime numbers. Consecutive prime numbers do NOT like to end by the same digit mod q. For example the probability that the difference of two consecutive prime numbers close to x is divisible by 3 is different than 1/2 one might very naively expect. It …