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:
info_outline
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:...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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.
info_outline
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
info_outline
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).
info_outline
The Brainpool Curves
ASecuritySite Podcast
Article:
info_outline
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
info_outline
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_outlinePlease 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 formatting Header 1 and Header 2 to have a six-point spacing underneath. So, for me, the contest between LaTeX and Microsoft Word is a knock-out in the first round.
And one of the great things about Leslie is that his work is strongly academic — and which provides foundations for others to build on. For this, he did a great deal on the ordering of task synchronisation, in state theory, cryptography signatures, and fault tolerance.
LaTeX
I really can say enough about how much LaTeX — created in 1984 — helps my work. I am writing a few books just now, and it allows me to lay out the books in the way that I want to deliver the content. There’s no need for a further mark-up, as I work on the output that the reader will see. But the true genius of LaTeX is the way that teams can work on a paper, and where there can be async to GitHub and where version control is then embedded.
Clocks
Many in the research community think that the quality measure of a paper is the impact factor of the journal that it is submitted to, or in the amount of maths that it contains. But, in the end, it is the impact of the paper, and how it changes thinking. For Leslie, in 1978, his paper on clocks changed our scientific world and is one of the most cited papers in computer science.
Byzantine Generals Problem
In 1981, Leslie B Lamport defined the Byzantine Generals Problem. And in a research world where you can have 100s of references in a paper, Leslie only used four (and which would probably not be accepted these days for having so few references). Within this paper, the generals of a Byzantine army have to agree to their battle plan, in the face of adversaries passing in order information. In the end, we aim to create a way of passing messages where if at least two out of three of the generals are honest, we will end up with the correct battle plan.
The Lamport Signature
Sometime soon, we perhaps need to wean ourselves of our existing public key methods and look to techniques that are more challenging for quantum computers. With the implementation of Shor’s algorithm [here] on quantum computers, we will see our RSA and Elliptic Curve methods being replaced by methods which are quantum robust. One method is the Lamport signature method and which was created by Leslie B. Lamport in 1979.