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 …
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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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 …
When Marc Stevens and a team of researchers from Google have finally found a collision for SHA-1, which we have been expecting for longer than 10 years, somebody who is apparently none of these people, has apparently used it to obtain 2.5 BTC prize created by Peter Todd.
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 …
Privacy In Part 1 we covered why privacy is essential for widespread cryptocurrency adoption, and concluded that neither Bitcoin nor Ethereum, or even ZCash is suitable for the task we’re wanting to solve: anonymity with efficiency. (Also the bonus property of needing no trusted setup)! COOL THING 1: STEALTH ADDRESSES The benefits of using stealth …
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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 …
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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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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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’ »