Excellent read. One example: Consider the case of basic public key cryptography, in which a person’s public and private key are created together in a single operation. These two keys are entangled, not with quantum physics, but with math. When I create a virtual machine server in the …
Researchers at Google have developed a watermark for LLM-generated text. The basics are pretty obvious: the LLM chooses between tokens partly based on a cryptographic key, and someone with knowledge of the key can detect those choices. What makes this hard is (1) how much text is required for …
Amazon Web Services (AWS) prioritizes the security, privacy, and performance of its services. AWS is responsible for the security of the cloud and the services it offers, and customers own the security of the hosts, applications, and services they deploy in the cloud. AWS has also been introducing quantum-resistant …
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Officials in Ireland have fined Meta $101 million for storing hundreds of millions of user passwords in plaintext and making them broadly available to company employees. Meta disclosed the lapse in early 2019. The company said that apps for connecting to various Meta-owned social networks …
On August 20, 2024, we announced the general availability of the new AWS CloudHSM hardware security module (HSM) instance type hsm2m.medium, referred to in this post as hsm2. This new type comes with additional features compared to the previous CloudHSM instance type hsm1.medium (hsm1). The new features …
Microsoft is updating SymCrypt, its core cryptographic library, with new quantum-secure algorithms. Microsoft’s details are here. From a news article : The first new algorithm Microsoft added to SymCrypt is called ML-KEM. Previously known as CRYSTALS-Kyber, ML-KEM is one of three post-quantum standards formalized last month by the National …
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Microsoft has updated a key cryptographic library with two new encryption algorithms designed to withstand attacks from quantum computers. The updates were made last week to SymCrypt, a core cryptographic code library for handing cryptographic functions in Windows and Linux. The library, started in 2006 …
Enlarge (credit: Yubico) The YubiKey 5, the most widely used hardware token for two-factor authentication based on the FIDO standard, contains a cryptographic flaw that makes the finger-size device vulnerable to cloning when an attacker gains temporary physical access to it, researchers said Tuesday. The cryptographic flaw, known as …
The NSA’s “ National Cryptographic School Television Catalogue ” from 1991 lists about 600 COMSEC and SIGINT training videos. There are a bunch explaining the operations of various cryptographic equipment, and a few code words I have never heard of before. [...]
From the Federal Register : After three rounds of evaluation and analysis, NIST selected four algorithms it will standardize as a result of the PQC Standardization Process. The public-key encapsulation mechanism selected was CRYSTALS-KYBER, along with three digital signature schemes: CRYSTALS-Dilithium, FALCON, and SPHINCS+. These algorithms are part of three …
This isn’t good : On Thursday, researchers from security firm Binarly revealed that Secure Boot is completely compromised on more than 200 device models sold by Acer, Dell, Gigabyte, Intel, and Supermicro. The cause: a cryptographic key underpinning Secure Boot on those models that was compromised in 2022. In …
Enlarge (credit: sasha85ru | Getty Imates) In 2012, an industry-wide coalition of hardware and software makers adopted Secure Boot to protect against a long-looming security threat. The threat was the specter of malware that could infect the BIOS, the firmware that loaded the operating system each time a computer booted …
A new paper, “Polynomial Time Cryptanalytic Extraction of Neural Network Models,” by Adi Shamir and others, uses ideas from differential cryptanalysis to extract the weights inside a neural network using specific queries and their results. This is much more theoretical than practical, but it’s a really interesting result …
A group of cryptographers have analyzed the eiDAS 2.0 regulation (electronic identification and trust services) that defines the new EU Digital Identity Wallet. [...]
Interesting paper about a German cryptanalysis machine that helped break the US M-209 mechanical ciphering machine. The paper contains a good description of how the M-209 works. [...]
The memorial service for Ross Anderson will be held on Saturday, at 2:00 PM BST. People can attend remotely on Zoom. (The passcode is “L3954FrrEF”.) [...]
Quantum computers are probably coming, though we don’t know when—and when they arrive, they will, most likely, be able to break our standard public-key cryptography algorithms. In anticipation of this possibility, cryptographers have been working on quantum-resistant public-key algorithms. The National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST …
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 …