World-leaders in Cryptography: Leslie Lamport
ASecuritySite Podcast
Please excuse the poor quality of my microphone, as the wrong microphone was selected. In research, we are all just building on the shoulders of true giants, and there are few larger giants than Leslie Lamport — the creator of LaTeX. For me, every time I open up a LaTeX document, I think of the work he did on creating LaTeX, and which makes my research work so much more productive. If I was still stuck with Microsoft Office for research, I would spend half of my time in that horrible equation editor, or in trying to integrate the references into the required format, or in...
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World-leaders in Cryptography: Daniel J Bernstein
ASecuritySite Podcast
Daniel J Bernstein (djb) was born in 1971. He is a USA/German citizen and a Personal Professor at Eindhoven University of Technology and a Research Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. At the tender age of 24 — in 1995 — he, along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation — brought a case against the US Government related to the protection of free speech (Bernstein v. United States: ). It resulted in a ruling that software should be included in the First Amendment. A core contribution is that it has reduced government regulations around cryptography. It was a sign of the...
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World-leaders in Cryptography: Jan Camenisch
ASecuritySite Podcast
Jan is the CTO and a Cryptographer at DFINITY, and, since 1998, he has consistently produced research outputs of rigour, novelty and sheer brilliance [here]. He was recently awarded the Levchin Prize at Real World Crypto 2024 - along with Anna Lysyanskaya. Jan’s research core happened when he was hosted in the IBM Zurich Research Lab, but has since moved to DFINITY, and is still producing research outputs that are some of the best in the whole of the computer science research area. He has published over 140 widely cited papers and has been granted around 140 patents. Jan has also received...
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An Interview with Ted Miracco
ASecuritySite Podcast
Ted Miracco is the CEO of Approov and which is Scottish/US company that is headquartered in Edinburgh. Miracco has over 30 years of experience in cybersecurity, defence electronics, RF/microwave circuit design, semiconductors and electronic design automation (EDA). He co-founded and served as CEO of Cylynt, which focuses on intellectual property and compliance protection
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World-leaders in Cybersecurity: Troy Hunt
ASecuritySite Podcast
Troy is a world-leading cybersecurity professional. He created and runs the Have I Been Pwned? Web site, and which contains details of the most significant data breaches on the Internet. Along with this, he has developed other security tools, such as ASafaWeb, which automated the security analysis of ASP.NET Web sites. Troy is based in Australia and has an extensive blog at
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The Greatest Step Change in Cybersecurity Ever! Welcome to the New and Scary World of Generative AI and Cybersecurity
ASecuritySite Podcast
This is Day 0 of a new world of cybersecurity. Everything changes from here. There will be a time before Generative AI (GenAI) in cybersecurity and a time after it. Over the last two years, GenAI has come on leaps and bounds, and where it once suffered from hallucinations, took racist and bigoted approaches, and often was over-assertive, within ChatGPT 4.5, we see the rise of a friendly and slightly submissive agent, and that is eager to learn from us. This LLM (Large Language Model) approach thus starts to break down the barriers between humans and computers and brings the opportunity to gain...
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Towards the Memex: All Hail The Future Rulers of our World
ASecuritySite Podcast
And, so George Orwell projected a world where every single part of our lives was monitored and controlled by Big Brother. Arthur C Clark outlined the day when machines focused solely on a goal — even if it was to the detriment of human lives. And, Isaac Asimov outlined a world where machines would have to be programmed with rules so that they could not harm a human. The Rise of the Machine With the almost exponential rise in the power of AI, we are perhaps approaching a technological singularity — a time when technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, and which can have...
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World-leaders in Cryptography: Marty Hellman (March 2024)
ASecuritySite Podcast
This seminar series runs for students on the Applied Cryptography and Trust module, but invites guests from students from across the university. Martin is one of the co-creators of public key encryption, and worked alongside Whitfield Diffie in the creation of the widely used Diffie-Hellman method. In 2015, he was presented with the ACM Turing Award (the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in Computer Science) for his contribution to computer science. He is currently a professor emeritus at Stanford University. https://engineering.stanford.edu/node/9141/printable/print
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World-leaders in Cryptography: Vincent Rijmen (March 2024)
ASecuritySite Podcast
Vincent Rijmen is one of the co-creators of the NIST-defined AES standard (also known as Rijndael). He also co-designed the WHIRLPOOL hashing method, along with designing other block ciphers, such as Square and SHARK. In 2002, Vincent was included in the Top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35, and, along with Joan Daemen, was awarded the RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics. He recently joined Cryptomathic as a chief cryptographer, and also holds a professor position (gewoon hoogleraar) at K.U.Leuven, and adjunct professorship at the University of Bergen, Norway. His paper on...
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World-leaders in Cryptography: Whitfield Diffie
ASecuritySite Podcast
Whitfield Diffie is one of the greatest Computer Scientists ever. He - along with Marty Hellman - was one of the first to propose the usage of public key encryption and co-created the Diffie-Hellman (DH) key exchange method. Overall, the Diffie-Hellman method is still used in virtually every Web connection on the Internet, and has changed from using discrete log methods to elliptic curve methods. In 2015, Whitfield was also awarded the ACM Turing Prize - and which is the Nobel Prize equivalent in Computer Science. In this on-line talk he meets with Edinburgh Napier University students,...
info_outlineI do what I do because of one company … IBM. Why? Because in the 1970s, I got into computers, with a ZX81 (1KB of RAM) and a Dragon 32 (32 KB of RAM). They were very much home computers, and where you would rush out and buy the latest computer magazine, and then spend a happy evening entering some BASIC code that made a cursor move across the screen using the IJLM keys. If you were very lucky you would manage to save it to a cassette — that could take over ten minutes to save a simple program — only to get an error at the end. I was hooked!
But, at work, we had a DEC VAX minicomputer, and which cost a fortune to buy and maintain (even in those days). This mini ran typically Pascal, and I remember running labs for students, and where they all decided to compile their program at the same time, and 30 minutes later, some of them would get their errors, and have to compile it again. Basically, every lab ended with me saying, “Sorry about that.”
The VAX, though, was not designed to support 25 students compiling their program at the same time … it was a batch processing machine and wanted to be given jobs that it could run whenever it had time. It basically came from the days when you handed in your punch cards (containing either FORTRAN if you were an engineer or COBOL if you were more business-focused) to someone with a white coat, and then came back the next week with a printed output with green lined paper.
But, just in time, the IBM PC arrived, and it was heavy but beautiful. So, as many in my department pushed for the VAX, but pushed for the PC for our labs. With their clock speed of 4.7 MHz, and 640KB of memory, I went ahead and bought a batch for a new PC lab. In those days there were no network switches, so they all connected with coaxial cable and had T-pieces to connect to the shared Ethernet bus. My logic was that we were paying around £20K for maintenance on the VAX, and where we could buy 20 £1K PC clones for the same cost. But, we’d have to maintain them. And, it worked. It freed us, and allowed us to run the classic Turbo Pascal (and Turbo C):
Our student could now bring in their 5-inch floppy disks and save their programs for later use. And the size of the hard disk? 20MB!
And, so, it is to IBM that we turn in starting the PC revolution, and today is the 100th anniversary of the IBM name — and first defined on 15 Feb 1924.