I quit my job towards the end of last month. When I started this blog, I told myself, “Don’t talk about work.” Since my employment is in the rear view mirror, I’m going to bend that rule for once. And most likely, only this one time. Why? Since I wrote a whole series about how […]
Last year, I went to the Quantum Village and encountered some absolute bullshit, which I proceeded to call out. This year, while I was walking around the Crypto + Privacy Village at DEFCON 31 in fursuit, a wild Cendyne approached me and asked, “There are going to be some debates at the Quantum Village; do […]
Tails from the Cryptographic Side of Security Research
Cryptographic agility is a vaguely defined property, but is commonly understood to mean, “Able to quickly swap between cryptographic primitives in response to new attacks.” Wikipedia defines cryptographic agility as: Cryptographic agility is a practice paradigm in designing information security protocols and standards in a way so that they can support multiple cryptographic primitives and […]
and Got Banned for Doing the Right Thing
If you really must support RSA in 2022, here’s some things to keep in mind.
Threema boldly claims to be more secure than Signal. Does this hold up to scrutiny?
Just to assuage any panic, let me state this up front. If you’re reading this blog post wondering if your Lobste.rs account is at risk, good news: I didn’t publish it until after the vulnerability was mitigated, so you’re safe. You don’t need to change your passwords or anything. This write-up is purely for education […]
Wherein some furry casually saves a University tens of thousands of dollars on a NIST SP 800-171 audit they were doomed to fail anyway.
Canonicalization Attacks occur when a protocol that feeds data into a hash function used in a Message Authentication Code (MAC) or Digital Signature calculation fails to ensure some property that’s expected of the overall protocol. The textbook example of a canonicalization attack is the length-extension attack against hash functions such as MD5–which famously broke the […]
Previously on Dead Ends in Cryptanalysis, we talked about length-extension attacks and precisely why modern hash functions like SHA-3 and BLAKE2 aren’t susceptible. The art and science of side-channel cryptanalysis is one of the subjects I’m deeply fascinated by, and it’s something you’ll hear me yap about a lot on this blog in the future. […]
Cryptographers and cryptography engineers love to talk about the latest attacks and how to mitigate them. LadderLeak breaks ECDSA with less than 1 bit of nonce leakage? Raccoon attack brings the Hidden Number attack to finite field Diffie-Hellman in TLS? And while this sort of research is important and fun, most software developers have much […]
Boycott Zed Shaw’s writing. (With bonus zero-days in his work.)
RSA is for encrypting symmetric keys, not entire messages. Pass it on.
The server for thedonald.win is hosted at 167.114.145.140. Read on to learn how I discovered this.
Imagine you’re a software developer, and you need to authenticate users based on a username and password. If you’re well-read on the industry standard best practices, you’ll probably elect to use something like bcrypt, scrypt, Argon2id, or PBKDF2. (If you thought to use something else, you’re almost certainly doing it wrong.) Let’s say, due to […]
This is the first entry in a (potentially infinite) series of dead end roads in the field of cryptanalysis. Cryptography engineering is one of many specialties within the wider field of security engineering. Security engineering is a discipline that chiefly concerns itself with studying how systems fail in order to build better systems–ones that are […]
Spyware written for educational institutions to flex their muscles of control over students and their families when learning from their home computer is still, categorically, spyware. Depending on your persuasion, the previous sentence sounds like either needless pedantry, or it reads like tautology. But we need to be clear on our terms. Educational spyware is […]
If you’re ever tasked with implementing a cryptography feature–whether a high-level protocol or a low-level primitive–you will have to take special care to ensure you’re not leaking secret information through side-channels. The descriptions of algorithms you learn in a classroom or textbook are not sufficient for real-world use. (Yes, that means your toy RSA implementation […]
Historical Context of Iota’s Hash Functions Once upon a time, researchers discovered that the hash function used within the Iota cryptocurrency (Curl-P), was vulnerable to practical collisions. When pressed about this, the Iota Foundation said the following: In response to this research, the Iota developers threatened to sue the researchers. Iota replaced Curl-P-27 with a […]
If you see the letters GNU in a systems design, and that system intersects with cryptography, I can almost guarantee that it will be badly designed to an alarming degree. This is as true of GnuPG (and PGP in general) as it is of designs like the proposed GNU Name System (IETF draft) and cryptographic […]
A paper was published on the IACR’s ePrint archive yesterday, titled LadderLeak: Breaking ECDSA With Less Than One Bit of Nonce Leakage. The ensuing discussion on /r/crypto led to several interesting questions that I thought would be worth capturing and answering in detail. What’s Significant About the LadderLeak Paper? This is best summarized by Table […]
Update (2021-01-09): There’s a newer blog post that covers different CloudFlare deanonymization techniques (with a real world case study). Furry Twitter is currently abuzz about a new site selling knock-off fursuits and illegally using photos from the owners of the actual fursuits without permission. Understandably, the photographers and fursuiters whose work was ripped off by […]
Update (2020-04-29): Twitter has fixed their oversight. Anyone who set their custom gender to a long volume of text, should still have it set to a long volume of text. The original article follows after the separator. I was recently made aware of a change to Twitter, which exposes a new Gender field. If you’ve […]
There are two news stories today. Unfortunately, some people have difficulty uncoupling the two. The Team Fortress 2 Source Code has been leaked. Hackers discovered a Remote Code Execution exploit. The second point is something to be concerned about. RCE is game over. The existence of an unpatched RCE vulnerability, with public exploits, is sufficient […]
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