Is crypto short for cryptography or cryptocurrencies? Grab your pitchforks! I’ve ranted against crypto-means-bitcoin since I first heard it. But the last few days have me wondering if we, the greying and already-grey cryptographers, should just accept it. At the … Continue reading Crypto as in Crypto
Blockchain and Bitcoin may prove to be amazing innovations that change our daily lives, but I doubt they will materially impact how we vote. Here’s why. What Blockchain Is and Isn’t The common way to describe Blockchain is something like: … Continue reading Blockchain and Voting
So there’s this hot new app called Secret. The app is really clever: it prompts you to share secrets, and it sends those secrets to your social circle. It doesn’t identify you directly to your friends. Instead, it tells readers that this secret was written by one of their friends without identifying which one. The popularity of the app appears to be off the charts, with significant venture-capital investment in a short period of time. There are amazing stories of people seeking out emotional support on Secret, and awful stories of bullying that have caused significant uproar. Secret has recently … Continue reading Power & Accountability
When we use terminology that is too broad, too coarse-grained, we make discussion more difficult. That sounds obvious, but it’s easy to miss in practice. We’ve made this mistake in spades with crypto. Discussing the field as one broad topic is counter-productive and leads to needless bickering. I see 3 major kinds of crypto: b2c crypto, b2b crypto, and p2p crypto. I suggest that we use this terminology consistently to help guide the discussion. We’ll spend less time talking about differences in our assumptions, and more time building better solutions. b2c crypto Business-to-Customer Crypto (b2c) is used to secure the … Continue reading there are 3 kinds of crypto
The New York Times is reporting that a flaw has been found in RSA. The original paper is here, and it looks like a second team was about to release similar information, so they’ve posted an explanatory blog post, which I recommend. A number of people are understandably concerned. Since I couldn’t find a simple explanation of what happened, I figured I would write one up. public-key encryption Public-key encryption is fascinating. You generate a keypair composed of a public and a private key. You post the public key on your web site, and anyone can use it to encrypt … Continue reading it’s the randomness, stupid
A few months ago, Sony’s Playstation Network got hacked. Millions of accounts were breached, leaking physical addresses and passwords. Sony admitted that their data was “not encrypted.” Around the same time, researchers discovered that Dropbox stores user files “unencrypted.” Dozens (hundreds?) closed their accounts in protest. They’re my confidential files, they cried, why couldn’t you at least encrypt them? Many, including some quite tech-savvy folks, were quick to indicate that it would have been so easy to encrypt the data. Not encrypting the data proved Sony and Dropbox’s incompetence, they said. In my opinion, it’s not quite that simple. Encryption … Continue reading encryption is (mostly) not magic
My friend Alon Rosen is leading an effort with colleagues Amon Ta-Shma, Ben Riva, and Yoni Ben-Nun in Israel to implement and deploy in-person open-audit voting. The project is called Wombat Voting. It combines a number of existing cryptographic techniques in a very nice package. Oh, and they’ve implemented it and used it to run a 2000+ voter election, with apparently a few more elections in the pipeline. There’s a ton of press about them. Here’s how it works: Voters use an intuitive, touch-screen interface, receive a paper ballot they can physically cast in a transparent ballot box, and they … Continue reading Wombat Voting: Open Audit Elections in Israel
I’m fascinated with how quickly people have reached for the pitchforks recently when the slightest whiff of a privacy/security violation occurs. Last week, a few interesting security tidbits came to light regarding Dropbox, the increasingly popular cloud-based file storage and synchronization service. There’s some interesting discussion of de-duplication techniques which might lead to Oracle attacks, etc., but the most important issue is that, suddenly, everyone’s realizing that Dropbox could, if needed, access your files. Miguel de Icaza wonders if Dropbox is pitching snake oil. Yes, Dropbox staff can, if needed, access your files. I don’t mean to harp on my … Continue reading grab the pitchforks!… again
For the past week, every security expert’s been talking about Comodo-Gate. I find it fascinating: Comodo-Gate goes to the core of how we handle trust and how web architecture evolves. And in the end, this crisis provides a rare opportunity. warning signs Last year, Chris Soghoian and Sid Stamm published a paper, Certified Lies [PDF], which identified the very issue that is at the center of this week’s crisis. Matt Blaze provided, as usual, a fantastic explanation: A decade ago, I observed that commercial certificate authorities protect you from anyone from whom they are unwilling to take money. That turns … Continue reading intelligently designing trust
Tonight, American Idol began online voting. Yes, I’m a fan of American Idol, but don’t let that fool you: I’m still a bitchin’ cryptographer. I suspect that American Idol online voting will give rise to many questions such as “wow, awesome, now when can I vote in US Elections with my Facebook account?” and “Why is online voting so hard anyways?” Perhaps I can be of assistance. the voting process So the process is much like other Facebook-connected sites: using Facebook Connect, you log in and grant the American Idol Voting site some permissions, including reading your profile info (ok), … Continue reading everything I know about voting I learned from American Idol
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