ASecuritySite Podcast

Related page: https://medium.com/asecuritysite-when-bob-met-alice/clocks-latex-byzantine-generals-and-post-quantum-crypto-meet-the-amazing-leslie-b-lamport-b2ade4b590d7 Demo: https://asecuritysite.com/hashsig/lamport   Introduction I write this article in Medium and with its limited text editor, but I really would love to write it in LaTeX. Before the monopoly of Microsoft Word, there were documen...

Related material Main page: https://billatnapier.medium.com/cryptography-fundamentals-8-rsa-rivest-shamir-and-adleman-445b91932bd0 RSA: https://asecuritysite.com/rsa   Introduction In August 1977, The Stranglers were in the music charts with "Something Better Change" and something really was changing, and it was something that would change the world forever. This was the month that Martin Gardner...

Cybersecurity Cloud Lesson 1 rule book in key management for companies: Your encryption keys are the keys to your castle. So protect them with your life! Your enemy is you! The main threat is insiders, so beware of yourself and others in your company. Beware of those that you trust and who you partner with. They can be your enemies, too. For sensitive data, try not to let Amazon or Microsoft manag...

Demos These are: Quadratic residues: https://asecuritysite.com/primes/q_res Jacobi symbol: https://asecuritysite.com/primes/jac Jacobi and Legendre symbol: https://asecuritysite.com/primes/jacobi Introduction Remember at school that class where the teacher taught you about how to square something? It was great, and where we loved to take the square of 3 and get 9, and the square of 5 gave us 25. B...

Please note, I slippled up a little in the podcast, and where the army size if 187,000. I have updated below. Web page: https://billatnapier.medium.com/cryptography-fundamentals-6-chinese-remainder-theory-ctr-2d1874943f15 And so a large army met. The general asks the collected troops to arrange themselves into groups of 50. He counts that there are four troops left without a group. He then asks fo...

Cryptography Fundamentals 5: GCD, Extended GCD and Group Generators This podcast will outline a few building blocks of cryptography: GCD (Greatest common divisor), extended GCD and group generators. These you will find in many related cryptography papers, and any weaknesses in these can cause significant problems to the overall security of a method.  Greatest common divisor— GCD A fairly simple co...

We live in a legacy world of money. Our transactions are often still based on moving paper money around, and we have basically scaled this into a digital world. At the core of this is the lack of any real cryptographic trust in digitally signing transactions. For this, the Bank of England is now discussing a CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) [2]: And before you reach for Ethereum smart contract...

Scott Helme is a Security Researcher, Entrepreneur and International Speaker. He is the creator of the Report URI and Security Headers Web site. More details: https://scotthelme.co.uk/

I will bet you, that you have a memory of school where you had the "pleasure" or, most likely, the "nightmare" of performing long addition or long subtraction, and where you had carry overs between columns. The units carried over in the tens, the tens into the hundreds, and so on. And, then, you encountered long multiplication with those ever growing list of numbers.  And, please forgive me, you p...

In previous podcasts, I outlined the usage of discrete logarithms in the form of a=g^x (mod p). Unfortunately, we now need a relatively large prime number to make sure it is now possible to discover x from a, g and p. This slows down the creation of the discrete log value. One method which has been used to replace them in some applications is to use elliptic curve points. Later in this series, I w...

A fundamental element in cryptography is the mapping of one group to another and then being able to map back again. In this, there should be no confusion about the mapping and where it should be deterministic in the mapping — that is, no matter how many times we do it, we will always create the same mapping. Obviously, we can add some randomisation into the process, but with the same randomization...

The problem with cryptography is that many miss some fundamental knowledge that will allow them to fully understand the key operations that are used. So, in this series of blogs, I try and explain some of the core concepts that secure our online world. Every single time that you connect to the Internet, the privacy and trustworthiness of your connection are dependent on some magical cryptographic...

How did you get started in this industry? What are the three key tech/software tools that you depend on the most? What is your favouriate book or podcast? What is the most important thing you have learned in your career? What advice would you give your younger self? Who inspires you?

Steve is a Professor of Cyber Security in the School of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham , as well as an Adjunct Professor at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia and an Honorary Professor at Nelson Mandela University in South Africa. He is also the Chair of Technical Committee 11 (Security and Privacy Protection) within the International Federation for Information Processin...

Never in the history of humankind have we advanced so fast. In just 40 years, we have built a new era and have said goodbye to the industry age. But will our future be an amazing world of opportunity where every citizen has the same opportunity as any other, or will we end up in a 1984 Big Brother world? At the core of this is the debate around privacy. Bruce Schneier sees this as a core element i...

We live in a strange world of cybersecurity. An auditor might ask a company if they encrypt their data? And the company may reply that they do, and so the auditor would tick that off. But encryption does not just involve the privacy of data; it also involves integrity checking and setting up digital trust. Along with this, there are many ways to implement methods, including key derivation, public...

In cybersecurity, you get those who pedal snake oil, and others that just try to scare you. The gap is that the advice is not given in an educated way , and basically just scares people (or gets them to buy the latest security product). These days, the chances of someone cracking your password from a hashed version is likely to be minimal. For one, the chances of getting access to the hashed versi...

The worm is turning! C and C++ have ruled the core of our digital world for a long time and still do. But, they do not handle memory well, where we get buffer overflows (Morris Worm, SQL Slammer, and so many more) or buffer underflows (Heartbleed). This can involve a stack overflow attack , and where the program writes too much data to the stack that has been allocated for a given buffer, and for...

We are human, and, like it or not, we lie. Why? Because we might not want to admit to some truth, or where we might want to seem knowledgeable. It is a human attribute, and it defines us. Overall, our intelligence weighs up the cost and reward and makes a decision as to whether we should tell the truth or not. Ask a child about who eat a biscuit, and there's a chance they will lie because they do...

I receive a good deal of incorrect emails on my Gmail account. Most of it relates to the gathering of war veterans in the US or church events in Illinois that I must attend. Why? Because someone, somewhere, has a similar email address to me. Perhaps it is Bill Buchan or Will Buchanan? Who knows, but I get them constantly, and where I discretely decline the invite and ask them to check the email ad...

Rock singers often say that it was their adversity that drove them to create their classics, such as heartache, sorrow, or losing something in their lives. And, so, we might quote: Sweet are the uses of adversity — William Shakespeare One such person who had considerable adversity is Leonhard Euler and who lived from 1707 to 1783. Leonhard was truly one of the greatest minds who has ever graced th...

So while there is much debate around people like Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf, we should also include "The Editor of the Internet": Jon Postel. Jon was born on 6 August 1943 and died in October 1998. Even up to his death, he was the editor of the Request for Comment (RFC) documents and administered the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). In 2012, he was inducted into the Internet Hall of...

Preface We should all have a magic switch that pushes aside our worries and replaces them with something that takes our woes away. So, when I've had a long and tiring day, and there are things buzzing in my head — I don't count sheep, I ponder the wonder of discrete logarithms, and in the magical ways they have solved our many online security. It relaxes me and pushes out all of those academic str...

I love wireless (wi-fi) communications. In fact, I did my PhD around the propagation of radio waves using Maxwell's equations. The beauty and perfection of radio waves will never leave me. The first thing you often learn about wifi is how the frequency of the wave relates to its wavelength (lambda=speed of light divided by the frequency) and how dipole antennas have to be around half a wavelength...

I have a secret. And you have a secret. And together, we can merge our secret into another secret. What I am outlining here is the beauty of the Elliptic Curve Diffie Hellman (ECDH) method, and it is protecting your rights to privacy in the access that you have to this podcast. And what about trust? Well, there's a chance that the Web site that you are receiving this podcast from is using the ECDS...