Prof Bill Buchanan OBE

Published in ASecuritySite: When Bob Met Alice

·Pinned

The Strange Tale of Dual_EC_DRBG

Julian Assange being arrested recently brought back memories of how he leaked Edward Snowden’s memos around the possible existence of an NSA-sourced cryptographic backdoor — the Dual EC standard (Dual_EC_DRBG). So let’s dive into the method and the trap door, and see the “magic” behind it. With Elliptic Curve methods…

Security

5 min read

Published in ASecuritySite: When Bob Met Alice

·9 hours ago

The Times They Are A-Changing: Post Quantum Cryptography Brings Rings and Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Just imagine, a future where all our data is encrypted, and where we can still process it. Seems like science fiction, but it is not. Basically, over the next decade or so, we will say goodbye to our “flawed” public key methods of RSA and ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography), and…

Cryptography

6 min read

Published in ASecuritySite: When Bob Met Alice

·2 days ago

A Long Goodbye to C and C++, And Hello To A Rusty Future

My first serious programming language was C. I copied BASIC code from computer magazines, but it was C that has become my native language. To me, Python has a crazy structure and syntax that I have to continually recap. I really dislike using Python, and would also avoid for…

Cybersecurity

8 min read

A Long Goodbye to C and C++, And Hello To A Rusty Future

Published in ASecuritySite: When Bob Met Alice

·5 days ago

The Magic of Cryptographic Identifiers and Formats: OIDs, DER and ASN.1

“30” (Sequence), “06” (OID) and “03” (Byte sequence) — Cryptography has a little secret that keeps it so successful — it manages to seamlessly upgrade itself. When a bug comes along, systems can update themselves almost instantly. And, when a method has been cracked or shows a vulnerability, we can easily update it. This has includes moving away from…

Cryptography

7 min read

The Magic of Cryptographic Identifiers and Formats: OIDs, DER and ASN.1

Published in ASecuritySite: When Bob Met Alice

·6 days ago

How Long Does It Take To Find a Random Prime Number?

Many of our public key methods rely on prime numbers, as they have wonderful properties, including a way of performing mathematical operations on numbers, but constrain them with a finite field (and where our maximum number is the prime number less one). The difficulty in RSA, for example, is to…

Cybersecurity

5 min read

How Long Does It Take To Find a Random Prime Number?

Published in ASecuritySite: When Bob Met Alice

·6 days ago

Your Online Security Is Critically Dependent on the Generation of Random Prime Numbers

It was Google who fundamentally changed cybersecurity. If not for them, we would probably still be connecting to insecure http sites. With Chrome, they pushed the industry to move towards https, and where any site that did not support it, would be marked as insecure. And so, nearly all of…

Cybersecurity

6 min read

Your Online Security Is Critically Dependent on the Generation of Random Prime Numbers

Published in ASecuritySite: When Bob Met Alice

·Sep 19

Let’s Talk About Keysizes in RSA

I was talking with a lead from a security team the other day, and they said that their company was using 2K RSA keys. I asked, “But, why 2K?”. “I don’t know!”, was the answer. “No one has asked me that before. Maybe it’s 256 bits. I can’t remember.” To…

Cryptography

6 min read

Published in ASecuritySite: When Bob Met Alice

·Sep 19

The Browser That Powers Apps … Meet Electron

And, so, Electron has helped developers, but is it the same old story, of bolting the barn door, after the horse has bolted? — You generally know what a browser looks like, and that it never quite achieves the same levels of security and performance as a native App. But, there’s a good chance you are using the Electron browser and framework for many of your applications:

Cybersecurity

4 min read

The Browser That Powers Apps … Meet Electron

Published in ASecuritySite: When Bob Met Alice

·Sep 19

Can You Solve This Big Integer Problem?

Update: I solved it … I just had to parse: $val=[BigInt]::Parse("1111111111111111111") $val On ASecuritySite, I have lots of examples of Python, Golang, Node.js, and JavaScript, so I have been converting a range of cryptography examples into PowerShell. The core advance of using PowerShell is that it can gain access to…

Cryptography

2 min read

Published in ASecuritySite: When Bob Met Alice

·Sep 18

For Your Online Security: Thank Miller and Rabin

We live in a digitally flawed world. Very little of what we see can be truly trusted. But there are some people who have strived to make our world more trusted, and Michael O. Rabin is one of the most predominant. He was born in 1931 in Germany. In the…

Cryptography

6 min read

For Your Online Security: Thank Miller and Rabin