The scheme’s security rests on 4 mathematical assumptions that have been widely used in other cryptographic contexts. And even the assumption that has been studied the least, called the “learning parity with noise” assumption, is related to a problem that has been studied since the 1950s. “You could imagine that maybe 50 years from now the crypto textbooks will basically say, ‘OK, here is a very simple construction of iO, and from that we’ll now derive all of the rest of crypto.’”
Tag: cryptography
Kolmogorov Complexity
Now our understanding of our search for meaning is starting to come together. We abhor randomness and love patterns. We are biologically programmed to find some patterns that explain what they see. But we can never be certain that the pattern we’ve identified is the right one. Even if we could somehow be assured that we haven’t made a mistake, and we are exhibiting a computer-like perfection, there may always still be a deeper truth to unearth. This tension helps drive our love of literature, theater, and the cinema. When we read a novel, or watch a play, the author or director is presenting us with a sequence of events that has a common theme, pattern, or moral. Literature, plays, and the cinema offer us a delightful escape from the usual unintelligible, meaningless chaos that we find in the real world around us. Really good literature goes further, and leaves us with the possibility of many interpretations. We come face to face with the incomputability of the Kolmogorov complexity.
Since time-bounded Kolmogorov complexity is computable, a natural next question is how hard it is to compute. And this is the question that Liu and Pass proved holds the key to whether one-way functions exist. Suppose you’ve set your sights on a less lofty goal than calculating the exact time-bounded Kolmogorov complexity of every possible string — suppose you’re content to calculate it approximately, and just for most strings. If there’s an efficient way to do this, then true 1-way functions cannot exist. In that case, all our candidate 1-way functions would be instantly breakable, not just in theory but in practice. “Bye-bye to cryptography”.
Conversely, if calculating the approximate time-bounded Kolmogorov complexity is too hard to solve efficiently for many strings, then true 1-way functions must exist. If that’s the case, their paper even provides a specific way to make one. The 1-way function that they describe in their paper is too complicated to use in real-world applications, but in cryptography, practical constructions often quickly follow a theoretical breakthrough. And if their function can be made practical, it should be used in preference to the candidate 1-way functions based on multiplication and other mathematical operations.
Wycheproof
In cryptography, subtle mistakes can have catastrophic consequences, and mistakes in open source cryptographic software libraries repeat too often and remain undiscovered for too long. Good implementation guidelines, however, are hard to come by: understanding how to implement cryptography securely requires digesting decades’ worth of academic literature. We recognize that software engineers fix and prevent bugs with unit testing, and we found that many cryptographic issues can be resolved by the same means. These observations have prompted us to develop Project Wycheproof, a collection of unit tests that detect known weaknesses or check for expected behaviors of some cryptographic algorithm. Our cryptographers have surveyed the literature and implemented most known attacks. As a result, Project Wycheproof provides tests for most cryptographic algorithms, including RSA, elliptic curve crypto, and authenticated encryption.
Giving up on PGP
Encryption Backdoors
They’ve been threatening this for months now, but Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein have finally released a “discussion draft” of their legislation to require backdoors in any encryption… and it’s even more ridiculous than originally expected. Yesterday, we noted that the White House had decided to neither endorse nor oppose the bill, raising at least some questions about whether or not it would actually be released. Previously, Feinstein was waiting for the White House’s approval — but apparently she and Burr decided that a lack of opposition was enough.
This is what happens when your government is run by elderly, luddite lawyers instead of engineers.
The Mastermind
Le Roux was something new, a self-made cartel boss whose origins were not in family connections but in code. Not just any code, but encryption software that would play a role in world events 12 years after he created it.
FBI regroups its going dark cosplay
So it appears that the mainstage event over the DOJ’s ability to force Apple to help it get around the security features of an iPhone is ending with a whimper, rather than a bang. The DOJ has just filed an early status report saying basically that it got into Syed Farook’s work iPhone and it no longer needs the court to order Apple to help it comply by writing a modified version of iOS that disables security features.
Symantec is anti-security
Why Symantec shouldn’t be trusted with anything, certainly not “security”
In this timeline of events, it becomes obvious that many examples selected were of a specific CA’s failures. This CA was intentionally chosen to show that these concerns are not isolated one-off incidents from a variety of unrelated CAs, but a long-term pattern of behavior. Unfortunately, a number of CAs have similarly problematic histories, so these issues are by no means limited to this single CA. The most vocal critics of the SHA-1 deprecation in the CA industry, and the most vocal advocates of ways in which to extend the dates, have repeatedly abused the concessions and delays afforded in the past, to the point of causing serious and long-lasting harm to the security of the Internet.
Decrypting with radiation
The attack sends a few carefully-crafted ciphertexts, and when these are decrypted by the target computer, they trigger the occurrence of specially-structured values inside the decryption software. These special values cause observable fluctuations in the electromagnetic field surrounding the laptop, in a way that depends on the pattern of key bits. The secret key can be deduced from these fluctuations, through signal processing and cryptanalysis.
!!!
Gregor J. Rothfuss 