A new paper presents a polynomial-time quantum algorithm for solving certain hard lattice problems. This could be a big deal for post-quantum cryptographic algorithms, since many of them base their security on hard lattice problems. A few things to note. One, this paper has not yet been peer reviewed …
Last week I posted a short memorial of Ross Anderson. The Communications of the ACM asked me to expand it. Here’s the longer version. [...]
Last week, I posted a short memorial of Ross Anderson. The Communications of the ACM asked me to expand it. Here’s the longer version. EDITED TO ADD (4/11): Two weeks before he passed away, Ross gave an 80-minute interview where he told his life story. [...]
Ross Anderson unexpectedly passed away Thursday night in, I believe, his home in Cambridge. I can’t remember when I first met Ross. Of course it was before 2008, when we created the Security and Human Behavior workshop. It was well before 2001, when we created the Workshop on …
The winner of the Best Paper Award at Crypto this year was a significant improvement to lattice-based cryptanalysis. This is important, because a bunch of NIST’s post-quantum options base their security on lattice problems. I worry about standardizing on post-quantum algorithms too quickly. We are still learning a …
GCHQ has released new images of the WWII Colossus code-breaking computer, celebrating the machine’s eightieth anniversary (birthday?). News article. [...]
AWS re:Invent drew 52,000 attendees from across the globe to Las Vegas, Nevada, November 27 to December 1, 2023. Now in its 12th year, the conference featured 5 keynotes, 17 innovation talks, and over 2,250 sessions and hands-on labs offering immersive learning and networking opportunities. Amazon …
We don’t have a useful quantum computer yet, but we do have quantum algorithms. Shor’s algorithm has the potential to factor large numbers faster than otherwise possible, which—if the run times are actually feasible—could break both the RSA and Diffie-Hellman public-key algorithms. Now, computer scientist …
In the AWS Speaker Profile series, we interview Amazon Web Services (AWS) thought leaders who help keep our customers safe and secure. This interview features Zach Miller, Senior Worldwide Security Specialist SA and re:Invent 2023 presenter of Securely modernize payment applications with AWS and Centrally manage application secrets …
This is interesting : For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that a large portion of cryptographic keys used to protect data in computer-to-server SSH traffic are vulnerable to complete compromise when naturally occurring computational errors occur while the connection is being established. [...] The vulnerability occurs when there are errors …
This is a fun challenge: The NIST elliptic curves that power much of modern cryptography were generated in the late ’90s by hashing seeds provided by the NSA. How were the seeds generated? Rumor has it that they are in turn hashes of English sentences, but the person who …
AWS Cryptography is pleased to announce that today, the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) awarded AWS-LC its validation certificate as a Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-3, level 1, cryptographic module. This important milestone enables AWS customers that require FIPS-validated cryptography to leverage AWS-LC as a fully …
Jake Appelbaum’s PhD thesis contains several new revelations from the classified NSA documents provided to journalists by Edward Snowden. Nothing major, but a few more tidbits. Kind of amazing that that all happened ten years ago. At this point, those documents are more historical than anything else. And …
Effective collaboration is central to business success, and employees today depend heavily on messaging tools. An estimated 3.09 billion mobile phone users access messaging applications (apps) to communicate, and this figure is projected to grow to 3.51 billion users in 2025. This post highlights the risks associated …
Earlier this year, Amazon Web Services (AWS) released Amazon Corretto Crypto Provider (ACCP) 2, a cryptography provider built by AWS for Java virtual machine (JVM) applications. ACCP 2 delivers comprehensive performance enhancements, with some algorithms (such as elliptic curve key generation) seeing a greater than 13-fold improvement over ACCP …
I just read an article complaining that NIST is taking too long in finalizing its post-quantum-computing cryptography standards. This process has been going on since 2016, and since that time there has been a huge increase in quantum technology and an equally large increase in quantum understanding and interest …
Seems that there is a deliberate backdoor in the twenty-year-old TErrestrial Trunked RAdio (TETRA) standard used by police forces around the world. The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), an organization that standardizes technologies across the industry, first created TETRA in 1995. Since then, TETRA has been used in products …
AWS re:Inforce took place in Anaheim, California, on June 13–14, 2023. AWS customers, partners, and industry peers participated in hundreds of technical and non-technical security-focused sessions across six tracks, an Expo featuring AWS experts and AWS Security Competency Partners, and keynote and leadership sessions. The threat detection …
Amazon Web Services (AWS) prioritizes security, privacy, and performance. Encryption is a vital part of privacy. To help provide long-term protection of encrypted data, AWS has been introducing quantum-resistant key exchange in common transport protocols used by AWS customers. In this blog post, we introduce post-quantum hybrid key exchange …
New research suggests that AIs can produce perfectly secure steganographic images: Abstract: Steganography is the practice of encoding secret information into innocuous content in such a manner that an adversarial third party would not realize that there is hidden meaning. While this problem has classically been studied in security …
In the AWS Security Profile series, we interview Amazon Web Services (AWS) thought leaders who help keep our customers safe and secure. This interview features Matt Campagna, Senior Principal, Security Engineering, AWS Cryptography, and re:Inforce 2023 session speaker, who shares thoughts on data protection, cloud security, post-quantum cryptography …
In the AWS Security Profile series, we interview Amazon Web Services (AWS) experts who help keep our customers safe and secure. This interview features Valerie Lambert, Senior Software Development Engineer, Crypto Tools, and upcoming AWS re:Inforce 2023 speaker, who shares thoughts on data protection, cloud security, cryptography tools …
AWS is excited to announce a new eBook, 5 Keys to Secure Enterprise Messaging. The new eBook includes best practices for addressing the security and compliance risks associated with messaging apps. An estimated 3.09 billion mobile phone users access messaging apps to communicate, and this figure is projected …
In this post, we’d like to introduce you to the cryptographic computing feature of AWS Clean Rooms. With AWS Clean Rooms, customers can run collaborative data-query sessions on sensitive data sets that live in different AWS accounts, and can do so without having to share, aggregate, or replicate …
In the AWS Security Profile — Cryptography Edition series, we interview Amazon Web Services (AWS) thought leaders who help keep our customers safe and secure. This interview features Panos Kampanakis, Principal Security Engineer, AWS Cryptography. Panos shares thoughts on data protection, cloud security, post-quantum cryptography, and more. What do you …