Every now and then, an ill-informed politician will stand before a microphone and say something along the lines of: encryption is helping bad guys (either terrorists, child pornographers, or other similarly acceptable target), because law enforcement can’t see what the bad guys are doing because they’re using sophisticated tools that use encryption. Said politician will urge tech companies to “work with us” to help catch these bad guys.
Read MoreHow secure is online public communication? Last May, a paper was published that discusses about the Diffie-Helman (DH) crypto-strength deployment, which gives strong evidence that the current DH usage is weak and suggests that 1024-bit size parameters can be broken with a nation state’s computing power resources. The paper presents possible scenarios where such an incident could occur. They found,…
Read MoreWe continue our look into the state of cryptography in 2014; Part 1 was posted earlier this week. Is Hardware Security Any Better? We closed the first post by asking: is hardware any more trustworthy? One would think that it is… but it’s not. Recently, chip vendors have been incorporating cryptography into their CPUs or chipsets. Usually,…
Read MoreIt seems like cryptography has been taking a knock recently. This is both good and bad, but is not actually true: cryptography is always under attack, and for that reason constantly evolves. That’s bad, but it’s good to realize that cryptography needs constant attention. The threat to cryptography can be very disruptive, as we most recently…
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