Shocking Discoveries about Blockchain Bitcoin and Ethereum Network-Level Vulnerabilities

We live on a planet where new technology seems to be working against the vast majority of humans living on this planet, rather than helping us to live better. This is sometimes called “singularity”, and Tristan Harris, a former Google ethics guru has now joined a public crusade so that tech companies “stop exploiting our …

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China is Banning TCP/IP

Arguably an open free and neutral Internet network has never existed and it was all a cynical game of telcos, pretending to obey a bunch of public standards and apply international treaties, in order to expand their monopolistic empires abroad and steal business from other telcos. This world of deception, which also has enabled intelligence …

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30 Years Ago

Exactly 30 years ago, Stasi was dissolved. 13 January 1990. 91,000 full time employees and 189,000 unofficial collaborators and informants lost their jobs and privileges. The German government has done a lot to preserve anything which Stasi has ever done. Some links: At this moment in Brussels, inside the EU Parliament there is an exposition on this …

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A New Documentary about WW2 Cryptanalysis of Enigma

A new documentary tells the story of the discovery of one of the most important cryptography papers of all times. We are talking about an extensive technical report written in German language and entitled “Kurzgefasste Darstellung der Auflösungsmethoden”. For some 80 years it has remained classified, part of the so called Gustave Bertrand WW2 archives. It was …

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A Linear Annihilator Property and Strong Biases with Original DES S-boxes

In 2004 I have published a paper [Crypto 2004, Santa Barbara] in which I explain the concept of the so called Bi-Linear attack on DES. The old attack was not extremely strong. It is possible to see that two conditions would be necessary for such an attack to somewhat work well in cryptanalysis of DES: There …

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A New Attack on Data Encryption Standard (DES)

There is abundant literature on the security of Data Encryption Standard (DES or 3DES). Today we have released a new way to attack this cipher, see Section 11 in here. Anyone who reads this paper should immediately see that the high confidence which have developed over decades in research community about our ability to design secure block …

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How to Backdoor a Block Cipher

I have written an elementary tutorial and a first proof of concept about how to backdoor a block cipher in a quite general setting. Potentially it applies to any block cipher. Success is not guaranteed though, see the paper. ADDED 2 JAN 2019: a new paper shows that invariants of higher degree are substantially more powerful. …

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