In the last 2 weeks it was possible to buy DAO tokens, a major new form of distributed business constructed to run on ETH blockchain. Until Friday 12 May 2016 some 50 M$ were invested. Then the price of these tokens has started raising [following the pre-determined rule] for the last 2 weeks of token …
On the V-Day and the 71st anniversary of defeating the Nazi Germany, we should remember how much the victory is owed to code breakers at Bletchley Park and elsewhere. 2016 UCL Code Breaking Competition (part of GA18). On this day it is my pleasure to announce the winners of the 2016 UCL Code Breaking competition. The winners …
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A very nice event with talks from leading European experts in crypto history will take place in Kassel, Germany on Thursday 5 May 2016. Enigma picture (c) source.
Enigma cipher machines are rare collector items which are worth a small fortune. It is estimated that at least 50,000 Enigma machines have been manufactured during the WW2. Some Enigma machines are more exceptional than other, as there are much fewer of them left. When Polish code breakers went to France after Poland was overrun by …
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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 …
A so called Bitcoin Generator Tool v.2.9 have been released today (Sat 3 Oct 2015) and already 260 downloads within a few hours! It is a ZIP file which claims that it performs full access on the Bitcoin central SQL database and allows one to add bitcoins to his account. Needless to say there is no such …
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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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Open source security software also helps criminals. For example TrueCrypt being free and easy to modify has lowered entry barriers for establishing criminal and cyber-espionnage operations (the same applies, well to Bitcoin software!). Example: Operation Potato Express. A fully functional clone of TrueCrypt was since at least 2011 distributed from Russian web sites such as …
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 …