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 …
Breaking news: the cryptography that we all know and use, such AES-128, SHA-1 and SHA-256, RSA/DH, and the most commonly used elliptic curve P-256 (a.k.a. secp256r1) are NO LONGER wholeheartedly supported by the NSA. In fact most of these, if not all, are not quite recommended anymore. Until now and for the last 10+ years the NSA and the …
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20 million dollars have just been invested in BitFury (July 2015), totaling 60 million which this company has raised (source: coindesk). There was nothing like this for at least 5 months. On Mining Profitability I find it very surprising that people invest in bitcoin mining. Why? My [private] conjecture is as follows: mining …
Two prominent bitcoin gurus Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn decided to release their own software distribution of bitcoin and ALTER the specification of bitcoin! There will be a possibility to mine blocks with a new version number and new rules. This is meant to make bitcoin more democratic: larger blocks, more transactions per second, lower fees, wider …
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: …