May 23, 2022
On May 4th, President Biden signed a new executive order focused on post quantum cryptography, his second featuring this subject in 2022, and we’ve still 8 months of the year to go.
Read Article ->February 4, 2022
On the 18th of January, President Biden signed an Executive Order that instantly re-shaped priorities and plans across all Federal Agencies. You may recall the previous order that was put out in May 2021. What’s new?Where May 2021 set out intentions, January 2022 sets out demands. Advice becomes requirements, and those requirements now have deadlines. In some cases agencies have 180 days (18th of July), and in some cases 30 days (18th of February).
Read Article ->July 21, 2021
Or ‘Wait, what does SCEP stand for again?’ Cryptography is the study of secure communication, but you would be forgiven if you thought it was a mathematician's hobby of creating unpronounceable acronyms. HSTS, really? What's wrong with something like Radar or Crispr? In this article we’ll go through some of the key terms and acronyms that pop up when working in the cryptography field.
Read Article ->June 15, 2021
It’s incredible that in this world there is any trust at all. You need only watch a nature documentary or CNBC to know deceit, treachery and malfeasance are rife. Yet, here we are. The vast majority of our transactions are secure and successful. Our passwords remain confidential, usually. Our data's integrity is preserved, more often than not
Read Article ->April 2, 2021
What do dragons do with their treasure anyway? As far as I can tell, their whole goal is to ensure their hoard is secure. End of list. Yet it seems to defeat the purpose of amassing a large amount of fungible assets not to put them to use. Surely, it would be better for the dragon to invest some of that treasure into seed funding for a direct-to-lair sheep delivery app. But, who am I to question the wisdom of the wyrm. Allowing for the occasional invisible hobbit, dragons have always done a good job at data security, sorry, treasure security.
Read Article ->February 26, 2021
Previously we talked about Zero Knowledge Proofs as an emerging way to avoid having to trust large organizations who may intentionally misuse or unintentionally compromise our data. Secure Multiparty Computation is a way for a number of parties to work together to solve a problem without revealing the information used in the computation to the other parties.
Read Article ->January 25, 2021
It was typical of renaissance and early-modern scientists to use anagrams or proto-hash functions of their scientific discoveries. The anagram of a Latin sentence would be published as a way of staking a claim to a scientific discovery that still required further research or results.
Read Article ->November 20, 2020
These are anxious times. For the worriers among us 2020 has been a bumper year. We’ve had a global pandemic and the rise of Fascism in democratic countries. Not content with this, the techno-literate fretful have added ‘Quantum Supremacy’ to the list of concerns....
Read Article ->January 21, 2019
A recent NIST paper recommending which steps to take to prepare for the advent of quantum computers proposes that users of cryptography look to achieve 'crypto agility' as soon as possible. The idea was further expanded by Gartner in a recent research note, and now crops up regularly. It's sometimes described as 'crypto-agnosticism', but what does it mean, and how does one achieve it?
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