NSA Plans To Retire Current Cryptography Standards

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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UCL Code Breaking Competition Winners Announced

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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Half of All Elliptic Curves Broken???

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: …

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TrueCrypt Security Audit Results

The final report can be found here. The report identifies 4 major vulnerabilities, 2 of them are judged of high severity and are as follows: The most commonly used windows versions of TrueCrypt were found to have a specific problem with calling the function CryptAcquireContext which is used in Truecrypt exclusively for the purpose of …

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Large Scale Bitcoin Thefts Continue

Another theft in a series: nearly 2 millions of dollars are missing from the BTER exchange. A specific transaction created by the thief can be found here. The theft took place on 14 Feb 2015. [added later] Another theft of some 250,000 USD has occurred at another Chinese exchange on 27 Jan 2015. Here some Internet posts …

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The Era of Irresponsibility Is Coming to An End?

A wind of change is blowing inside the bitcoin community. For many many years the dominant ideology in bitcoin community was that open source software such as bitcoin is “secure”, and that you need to trust the infinite wisdom of the crowd who will find all the bugs and fix them, the wisdom of the …

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Imitation Game Movie – Is A Single Fact Related By This Movie Actually True?

Dr Sue Black [UCL, saving the Bletchley Park activist] explains how much the true story of breaking Enigma during the WW2 is not at all what the movie shows us, and explains that though so many things in the movie are just totally historically inaccurate,  it would be somewhat very difficult to tell the real story …

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