Tag Archives: crypto

Bears in the MYST

NYT infographic on ursine cryptography: Where’s Jared Diamond when you need him to reaffirm your master narrative?
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Old school 2.0

ASCII art stego web service. (wayner)
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You’ve read about it…

…and here it is, at least according to Getty Images: WASHINGTON—FEBRUARY 24: A military aide carries the nuclear football, with the nation’s nuclear launch codes, through Statuary Hall as President Barack Obama arrives at the U.S. Capitol for his address to a joint session of Congress on February 24, 2009 in Washington, DC. U.S. President [...]
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“MD5 considered harmful”

That was the name of a paper delivered today at the 25th Annual Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin (summary, PDF). The geeky trope “considered harmful” doesn’t quite convey how serious this is; the equally geeky, equally tropey “be afraid, be very afraid” might’ve been a bit better. We have identified a vulnerability in the Internet [...]
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Obfuscated TCP

This seems useful: Obfuscated TCP is a backwards-compatible modification to the TCP protocol which adds opportunistic encryption. It’s designed to hamper and detect large-scale wiretapping and corruption of TCP traffic on the Internet. TLS [Transport Layer Security] is the solution to protecting sensitive information. However, there’s room for a low setup cost protocol to protect [...]
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Private-public key history

Steve Bellovin’s “Prehistory of Public Key Cryptography” (08-01-16) says the technique was developed several years earlier than thought—and, according to former NSA Director Bobby (Ray) Inman, “a decade earlier than Diffie and Hellman,” possibly inspired by “a World War II–era paper by an unknown person at Bell Labs.” In a talk “The Early Days in [...]
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