World-leaders in Cryptography: Matthew Green
ASecuritySite Podcast
Matthew is a cryptographer and academic at Johns Hopkins University and has designed and analyzed cryptographic systems used in wireless networks, payment systems and digital content protection platforms. A key focus of his work is in the promotion of user privacy. He has an extensive following on X/Twitter (140K followers) and his blog covers important areas of cryptography: His research has been cited over 15,000 times and includes work on Zerocash, Zerocoin and Identity Based Encryption (IBE), and more recently on privacy-aware signatures:
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World Leaders in Cryptography: Alfred Menezes
ASecuritySite Podcast
Alfred Menezes is a Professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. In 2001, he won the Hall Medal from the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications. Alfred is the lead author of the Handbook of Applied Cryptography, and which has been cited over 25,000 times. He has published many high impact papers, especially in areas of public key encryption and elliptic curve cryptography, and was the co-inventor of the ECDSA signature method. His website for online courses is https://cryptography101.ca. The "Cryptography101: Building Blocks" and "Cryptography 101:...
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World-leaders in Cryptography: Bruce Schneier (Nov 2024)
ASecuritySite Podcast
This seminar series runs for students on the Network Security and Cryptography module, but invites guests to participate. Bruce has created a wide range of cryptographic methods including Skein (hash function), Helix (stream cipher), Fortuna (random number generator), and Blowfish/Twofish/Threefish (block ciphers). Bruce has published 14 books, including best-sellers such as Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World. He has also published hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers. Currently, Bruce is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and...
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World-leaders in Cryptography: Brent Waters
ASecuritySite Podcast
Brent Waters is a Professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the Director of the Cryptography Lab at NTT Research. He graduated from the UCL in 2000, then completed a PhD at Princeton University in 2004. After this, he moved on to Stanford as a postdoc. Overall, Brent was the first to propose Attribute-based Encryption (ABE) and also the first to outline functional encryption. He was also awarded the Sloan Research Fellowship in 2010, and, in 2015, he was awarded the Grace Murray Hopper Award for his work on ABE and functional encryption. Brent’s research has been cited...
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Get Used to Three Boring Acronyms: ML-KEM, ML-DSA and SLH-DSA
ASecuritySite Podcast
Well, as if cybersecurity doesn’t have enough acronyms. There’s RIP, OSPF, TCP, IP, SSH, AES, and so many others. Now, there are three really important ones to remember: ML-KEM (Module Lattice-Based Key Encapsulation Mechanism), ML-DSA (Module Lattice-Based Signature Standard) and SLH-DSA (Stateless Hash-based Digital Signature Standard). ML-KEM is defined in the FIPS 203 standard, ML-DSA as FIPS 204, and for SLH-DSA, we have FIPS 205.
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So What Is A PreHash, And What Has it to do With Post Quantum Signatures?
ASecuritySite Podcast
The cybersecurity world is changing, and where the signature methods of RSA, ECDSA and EdDSA are likely to be replaced by FIPS 204 (aka ML-DSA Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Standard— Dilithium) and FIPS 205 (aka SLH-DSA (Stateless Hash-based Digital Signature Standard — SPHINCS+) https://medium.com/@billatnapier/so-what-is-a-prehash-and-what-has-it-to-do-with-post-quantum-signatures-bf7812cfa203
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CMAC or HMAC?
ASecuritySite Podcast
In cybersecurity, there are so many acronyms, and to be an expert, you really need to dig underneath the methods and understand how they work. One weak area of the industry is in the usage of MACs (Message Authentication Codes). With the public-key signing, we use a public key and a private key, where the private key will digitally sign a hash of the message, and where the public key is verified the signature. With a MAC, we use a shared symmetric key, and where Bob and Alice will share the same secret key (Figure 1).
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The Brainpool Curves
ASecuritySite Podcast
Article:
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Our Current Hardware Architectures Are Often Not Fit For a World of ML and Homomorphic Encryption
ASecuritySite Podcast
Article: https://medium.com/asecuritysite-when-bob-met-alice/our-current-hardware-architectures-are-often-not-fit-for-a-world-of-ml-and-homomorphic-encryption-1df5a4a45a4d
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NIST Looks To The Future of Cryptography: SHA-1, 3DES and SHA-224 on Naughty Step
ASecuritySite Podcast
Article: https://billatnapier.medium.com/nist-looks-to-the-future-of-cryptography-sha-1-3des-and-sha-224-on-naughty-step-7295d03fdc54
info_outlineDaniel 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: here). 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 greatness that was to come from the amazing mind of Daniel. His viewpoint on reducing the strength of cryptography at the time defined:
“There are, fortunately, not many terrorists in the world. But there are many criminals exploiting Internet vulnerabilities for economic gain. They infiltrate computers and steal whatever secrets they can find, from individual credit-card numbers to corporate business plans. There are also quite a few vandals causing trouble just for fun.”
Since then few others have done so much for the cause of privacy, including creating the Sala20 [link] stream cipher in 2005, and then with ChaCha20 [link] and Poly1305 in 2008. Many connections in TLS now use ChaCha20, rather than AES, as it is faster — over three times after than AES — and has a lower computing requirement. His love of using dance names also comes to the fore with Rumba [here].
It is not just in symmetric key encryption that he has contributed to, he has made significant contributions to public key encryption. In 2005, he defined the Curve 25519 elliptic curve, and which is now a fairly standard way of defining elliptic curves. For signatures, he then defined Ed25519, and the resultant version of a new EdDSA signature (and which is now included in OpenSSH). The Tor protocol, for example, uses Curve 25519 for its key exchange for each of the nodes involved in a secure route.
He defined the SPHINCS+ method for PQC digital signatures. This is one of the NIST approved methods for quantum robust signatures.
In 2015, Daniel defined the methods that the NSA may have used to compromise the NIST defined elliptic curves [paper]. And 2005, it was Daniel again who introduced a new type of attack [here].
Daniel run his Web site from https://cr.yp.to