cross-posted from: https://links.hackliberty.org/post/989486

We know the end of the line is in sight for classical cryptography. All the security encryption that protects our bank accounts, websites, and credit cards today will eventually be broken. That's not just a threat; that's the reality.

When Q-Day comes, which is the day quantum computers can break our existing encryption methods, we'll need a replacement for Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), RSA, and Blowfish. That's why the Linux Foundation and others have united behind the Post-Quantum Cryptography Alliance (PQCA).

It's also important to note that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will be broken, too. As the Katten law firm's Daniel Davis and Alexander Kim recently observed: "Quantum computers have the potential to break the most

Daniel Bernstein at the University of Illinois Chicago says that the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is deliberately obscuring the level of involvement the US National Security Agency (NSA) has in developing new encryption standards for “post-quantum cryptography” (PQC). He also believes that NIST has made errors – either accidental or deliberate – in calculations describing the security of the new standards. NIST denies the claims.

“NIST isn’t following procedures designed to stop NSA from weakening PQC,” says Bernstein. “People choosing cryptographic standards should be transparently and verifiably following clear public rules so that we don’t need to worry about their motivations. NIST promised transparency and then claimed it had shown all its work, but that claim simply isn’t true.”

The mathematical problems we use to protect data are practically impossible for even the largest supercomputers to crack today. But when quantum computers become reliable and

Like, could you just invert all the bits in a block of data and turn it into nonsense?

Or shift/rotate bits, so 10000101 would become 00001011, rather than using an encryption function.

It would be easy to break if you just figured out which bit operations were made, but it's a wierd thing to do so.. would it be obvious at all that it was such a simple encryption method from the raw data?

Just had that thought, it sounds like a 'security through obscurity' measure.

The war against online censorship and surveillance recently saw a formidable development that could turn the tide in favor of internet freedom and privacy. Cloudflare, the notable internet infrastructure titan, has unveiled support for the Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) privacy feature, essentially creating a sanctuary for free speech advocates and challenging established site-blocking endeavors.

For the uninitiated, as TorrentFreak reported, web blocking has been the entertainment sector’s favored anti-piracy tool for over a decade and a half. Employed in more than forty nations, this method involves Internet Service Providers (ISPs) blocking access to specific websites, often under a legal directive. While it started with rudimentary DNS blockades, the system evolved, employing sophisticated Server Name Indication (SNI) eavesdropping techniques, or sometimes a mix. But it has also been used as a way for governments to cen

The Signal Protocol is a set of cryptographic specifications that provides end-to-end encryption for private communications exchanged daily by billions of people around the world. After its publication in 2013, the Signal Protocol was adopted not only by Signal but well beyond. Technical information on the Signal Protocol can be found in the specifications section of our docs site.

Today we are happy to announce the first step in advancing quantum resistance for the Signal Protocol: an upgrade to the X3DH specification which we are calling PQXDH. With this upgrade, we are adding a layer of protection against the threat of a quantum computer being built in the future that is powerful enough to break current encryption standards.

In 1997, a contest began to develop a new encryption algorithm to become the Advanced Encryption Standard. After years of debate, one algorithm was chosen as the AES. But how does AES work? And what makes for a secure encryption algorithm?

Spanning Tree is an educational video series about computer science and mathematics. See more at https://spanningtree.me

To be notified when a new video is released, sign up for the Spanning Tree mailing list at https://spanningtree.substack.com/

Spanning Tree is created by Brian Yu. https://brianyu.me/

Email me at [email protected] to suggest a future topic.

• 0:00 The Contest
• 1:02 Encryption
• 3:57 Confusion and Diffusion
• 5:44 Block Cipher
• 6:55 KeyExpansion
• 7:34 AddRoundKey
• 8:14 Substitution Cipher
• 8:55 SubBytes
• 11:30 MixColumns
• 12:53 ShiftRows
• 13:21 The Algorithm

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4ATDMIz5wc
• https://piped.video/watch?v=C4ATDMIz5wc

Aug 22, 2023

I'm following this course with its book and it's really nice.

cross-posted from: https://community.hackliberty.org/post/4425

"Just over a week ago, we announced that Iranian censors had started blocking all Signal traffic in the country. As an interim solution to help people in Iran get connected again, we’ve added support in Signal for a simple TLS proxy that is easy to set up, can be used to bypass the network block, and will securely route traffic to the Signal service."

cross-posted from: https://community.hackliberty.org/post/2113

These repositories contain an archival fork of the Tornado Cash and Tornado Cash Nova source code base. They are maintained on Github by Matthew D. Green of Johns Hopkins for teaching and research purposes.

Tornado Cash and Tornado Nova are open-source coin mixing tools that were developed by an independent team of software developers and deployed onto Ethereum and several other blockchains. On August 8, 2022 the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), a division of the US Treasury, declared "Tornado Cash" and "Tornado Cash Nova" to be Specially Designated Nationals (SDNs): the result was to effectively sanction the Tornado Cash organization, its software development repositories, and the main smart contract deployment on Ethereum.

This move to sanction Tornado Cash represents the first instance in which the US government has applied economic sanctions to an open source software project. As a result of this announcement

cross-posted from: https://community.hackliberty.org/post/309

cross-posted from: https://community.hackliberty.org/post/18

I put together a short paper on understanding the underlying mathematics of RSA encryption. I hope it helps others to understand what is happening at a fundamental level with RSA

cross-posted from: https://community.hackliberty.org/post/17

cross-posted from: https://community.hackliberty.org/post/25302

cross-posted from: https://community.hackliberty.org/post/20087

Earlier this year, Cendyne published A Deep Dive into Ed25519 Signatures, which covered some of the different types of digital signature algorithms, but mostly delved into the Ed25519 algorithm. Truth in advertising.

This got me thinking, “Why isn’t there a better comparison of different elliptic curve signature algorithms available online?”

Most people just defer to SafeCurves, but it’s a little dated: We have complete addition formulas for Weierstrass curves now, but SafeCurves doesn’t reflect that.

For the purpose of simplicity, I’m not going to focus on a general treatment of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), which includes pairing-based cryptography, Elliptic-Curve Diffie-Hellman, and (arguably) isogeny cryptography.

Instead, I’m going to focus entirely on elliptic curve digital signature algorithms.

cross-posted from: https://community.hackliberty.org/post/12439

This post is about running Rocket.Chat on Constellation, which gives, well, "always encrypted" Rocket.Chat 🙂

This is cool, because "always encrypted" Rocket.Chat shields the entire server-side of Rocket.Chat from the (cloud) infrastructure and ensures that all data is always encrypted - even during processing in memory.

cross-posted from: https://community.hackliberty.org/post/10450

Join the discussion at GitHub - net4people/bbs

cross-posted from: https://community.hackliberty.org/post/8851

cross-posted from: https://links.hackliberty.org/post/136

cross-posted from: https://community.hackliberty.org/post/77

An entity controlling MEGA’s core infrastructure can tamper with the encrypted RSA private key and deceive the client into leaking information about one of the prime factors of the RSA modulus during the session ID exchange. More specifically, the session ID that the client decrypts with the mauled private key and sends to the server will reveal whether the prime is smaller or greater than an adversarially chosen value. This information enables a binary search for the prime factor, with one comparison per client login attempt, allowing the adversary to recover the private RSA key after 1023 client logins. Using lattice cryptanalysis, the number of login attempts required for the attack can be reduced to 512.