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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D-Day For Z.Cash

Today the first ever truly anonymous crypto currency ZEC went live. The full P2P client can be downloaded from here [Linux only for now]. The total number of ZEC coins will be only 21 million, like in bitcoin. Zerocash also reproduces few other unreasonable properties known from bitcoin: bizarre monetary policy with inelastic monetary supply and block halving every …

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Controversy Around Profitability of AltCoin Investment

There is a considerable controversy around whether investing in a balanced basket of cryptocoins is a good idea. Two serious sources show that this sort of investment enjoys steady growth without a lot of downturns, cf. DLT10 Index and a recent detailed study which concentrates on a shorter period with excellent returns since Jan 2016 (cf. also …

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How Many 1024-bit Primes Have Backdoors?

So how did the NSA backdoored the Internet or did they??? New ground-breaking paper shows that DSA and DH mod P keys with 1024 bits are vulnerable to practical backdoors which can be exploited to break our secure communications. Few highlights: For such trapdoored primes the DL problem can be solved in 2 months by an academic cluster. The …

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