NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Candidate Cracked

Much more detail linked to.   Post quantum still an issue.  

ACM NEWS

NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Candidate Cracked  By David Geer

Commissioned by CACM Staff, January 24, 2023

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology intended its PQC standard algorithms to resist post-quantum hacking capabilities, but the researchers broke SIKE using a legacy computer chip.

Belgian researchers have cracked the SIKE cryptographic algorithm, a fourth and final-round candidate that the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) was evaluating for its Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) standard.

Wouter Castryck and Thomas Decru, research experts at the KU Leuven research university in Leuven, Belgium, broke the SIKE algorithm in about 62 minutes. They did it using a single core on a six-core Intel Xeon CPU E5-2630v2 at 2.60GHz, according to their article, An Efficient Key Recovery Attack On SIDH. 

NIST intends its PQC standard algorithms to resist post-quantum hacking capabilities. Yet, the researchers broke SIKE using a legacy computer chip.

According to an article on the news site The Debrief, experts, authorities, and news outlets have confirmed the researchers' findings. NIST has since determined that it will not standardize the SIKE algorithm.

As part of its PQC Standardization Process, NIST chose 69 of 82 cryptographic algorithm candidates for the first round of its evaluations, according to The Register. NIST had narrowed its list to eight algorithms, including SIKE, by July 2022, according to NIST.

The same month, Castryck and Decru cracked SIKE, including SIKE parameters that people thought could meet NIST quantum security levels one through five, according to the article by Castryck and Decru. "On July 22, we informed the SIKE team about our attack, and on July 30, we posted our corresponding paper online," says Castryck.

PQC algorithms matter because criminal hoard encrypted data for future attacks using quantum computers. "There's a threat called' harvest now, decrypt later'. Your enemy could get access to your data and copy it. Though it's encrypted, they can hold on to it until the quantum computer comes out, then they can get into it," says Dustin Moody, a mathematician at NIST.

According to a Whitehouse.gov fact sheet, President Biden has mandated that NIST will publish quantum-resistant cryptographic standards to mitigate the risk that quantum computers could break the cryptography safeguarding digital communications on the Internet.

According to an Office of Management and Budget memorandum, the U.S. must transition its cryptographic systems to quantum-resistant cryptography, mitigating as much of the quantum risk as possible by 2035. However, according to McKinsey, quantum computers may crack classical encryption methods as soon as 2030. Obviously, affected organizations must implement the PQC standards as quickly as they can once these become available.

The SIKE crack is both concerning and encouraging, according to Tomas Gustavsson, chief Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) officer of Keyfactor, a PKI-as-a-Service company. "It's normal to break new suggested algorithms, which is a sign that good cryptographers are working on evaluating those," says Gustavsson.

"The concern is that we probably can't trust SIKE's underlying mathematical problem of supersingular isogenies any longer," says Gustavsson. "So, the SIKE hack may also have implications for other algorithms that people have based on the same problem," he says. 

NIST has already selected four cryptographic algorithms for PQC standardization: CRYSTALS-Kyber, CRYSTALS-Dilithium, FALCON, and SPHINCS+. Three additional algorithms are under consideration in the fourth round of the NIST evaluation process: Classic McEliece, BIKE, and HQC. "We think we might choose one or two more of those fourth-round algorithms, but we wanted more time to evaluate them," says Moody.

There are challenges to creating cryptographic algorithms that can resist quantum-level hacking. "Solving challenging scientific problems, and having a high level of confidence in these, always takes a lot of time and effort by scientists, engineers, and whole teams of people," says Gustavson.

The algorithms NIST chose for PQC standardization use older, harder math problems that many people have studied, according to Castryck. The hope is that quantum computers will not break these four algorithms, he says, although there is always that possibility.

According to Moody, no one can guarantee that no one will ever develop a smart new attack that could break a post-quantum cryptographic algorithm. "The best we can do in cryptography (post-quantum or not) is say that a lot of smart people have looked at it for many years and believe it is secure, i.e., no known attacks or lines of attack seem viable," says Moody.

It is essential for organizations not to lock into a single algorithm, according to Ted Shorter, CTO of Keyfactor. "I suspect that's part of why NIST is looking to standardize several algorithms this time," says Shorter.  ... ' 

Can We Secure Cryptography Against Quantum Attacks?

Key Issue.   Considerable tech depth here by leaders in the field. 

Can We Secure Cryptography Against Quantum Attacks?, By Bennie Mols

Commissioned by CACM Staff, November 10, 2022

The HLF post-quantum cryptography panel.

The Heidelberg Laureate Forum post-quantum cryptography panel. From left, Whitfield Diffie, Vinton G. Cerf, Adi Shamir, Vadim Lyubashevsky, and Gregor Seiler.

While a useful quantum computer is still under development, it already is known that when adversaries will start to use it, today's public-key cryptography will be broken. To protect digital information and services against attacks with a quantum computer, a new type of cryptography is needed: post-quantum cryptography.

The 9th Heidelberg Laureate Forum organized a panel discussion on post-quantum cryptography that included three Turing Award recipients: Adi Shamir (the S in RSA), Whitfield Diffie (of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol), and Vint Cerf (co-developer of the TCP/IP Internet protocol suite). They were accompanied by two research scientists at IBM Research Europe in Zürich, Switzerland, from a younger generation: Vadim Lyubashevsky and Gregor Seiler, who contributed to the design and implementation of some of the cryptographic schemes selected by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in July 2022 as upcoming standards for public-key encryption and digital signatures.

In the six years since NIST first called upon cryptographers for ways to protect information from quantum computing, they have come up with what they refer to as quantum-resistant algorithms. How can we know for certain that quantum computers are unable to break those algorithms?

The panelists agreed there is no mathematical proof that demonstrates the new algorithms can't be broken by a quantum computer; it is just that cryptographers can make that claim plausibly because it would be extremely hard to accomplish, said Lyubashevsky, "We base a cryptographic standard on a mathematical problem, and we have a lot of people working to solve that problem. If they can't solve it, we think it is secure. One can't expect anything more."

Shamir agreed, adding that he was a bit concerned that the new schemes chosen by NIST are all based on the same type of mathematics, called lattices. "In some sense, we are putting all eggs in the same basket, but that is the best we have."

Diffie pointed out that "So far, we have failed to develop a complexity theory that gives us real confidence in cryptography. But if you look at the history of the field, you have lifetimes for crypto systems that run into decades."

While a practical quantum computer still does not exist, and it looks like it might take another 20 to 30 years to achieve one, then how quickly do we need to implement post-quantum cryptographic standards?

"The real danger is that somebody is going to record the encrypted texts which are being used today," said Shamir. "But in 20 years' time, they will be able to use their future quantum computers in order to look back and decipher messages from the past. So, anyone who has long-term, high-level secrets, like governments, should be worried. They should not use RSA any more, but one of the new standards."

"There is another good reason to make the switch now," said Seiler, "even if someone doesn't need data to be secure for a very long time. That is because it takes a long time to deploy cryptography in large systems, like the Internet. Standards have to be changed and implemented; people have to be trained. So, even if we still have to wait a while for the quantum computer, it might be too late if we wait on switching to more secure cryptography."

The fact that computing is becoming more distributed, and thus more complicated, is another argument for not delaying the switching of standards, said Lyubashevsky. "With distributed computing, everyone has to go in it by themselves and do this switch, and if they don't, it all collapses.

"We are moving in a direction where more people will be responsible for their own data because they don't trust anybody else with it. But if we want to do distributed computing combined with cryptography in the future, we have to hurry up." ...  '   

Post-Quantum Cryptography Scheme Is Cracked?

 Generally true? Is this easily fixable, say by adding more digits? This kind of work, which challenges new methods is key. 

‘Post-Quantum’ Cryptography Scheme Is Cracked on a Laptop

Two researchers have broken an encryption protocol that many saw as a promising defense against the power of quantum computing.

By Jordana Cepelewicz, Senior Writer,    QuantaMagazine

If today’s cryptography protocols were to fail, it would be impossible to secure online connections — to send confidential messages, make secure financial transactions, or authenticate data. Anyone could access anything; anyone could pretend to be anyone. The digital economy would collapse.

When (or if) a fully functional quantum computer becomes available, that’s precisely what could happen. As a result, in 2017 the U.S. government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) launched an international competition to find the best ways to achieve “post-quantum” cryptography.

Last month, the agency selected its first group of winners: four protocols that, with some revision, will be deployed as a quantum shield. It also announced four additional candidates still under consideration.

Abstractions navigates promising ideas in science and mathematics. Journey with us and join the conversation.

Then on July 30, a pair of researchers revealed that they had broken one of those candidates in an hour on a laptop. (Since then, others have made the attack even faster, breaking the protocol in a matter of minutes.) “An attack that’s so dramatic and powerful … was quite a shock,” said Steven Galbraith, a mathematician and computer scientist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Not only was the mathematics underlying the attack surprising, but it reduced the (much-needed) diversity of post-quantum cryptography — eliminating an encryption protocol that worked very differently from the vast majority of schemes in the NIST competition.

“It’s a bit of a bummer,” said Christopher Peikert, a cryptographer at the University of Michigan.

The results have left the post-quantum cryptography community both shaken and encouraged. Shaken, because this attack (and another from a previous round of the competition) suddenly turned what looked like a digital steel door into wet newspaper. “It came out of the blue,” said Dustin Moody, one of the mathematicians leading the NIST standardization effort. But if a cryptographic scheme is going to get broken, it’s best if it happens well before it’s being used in the wild. “There’s many emotions that go through you,” said David Jao, a mathematician at the University of Waterloo in Canada who, along with IBM researcher Luca De Feo, proposed the protocol in 2011. Certainly surprise and disappointment are among them. “But also,” Jao added, “at least it got broken now.”  .... ' 

War and Crypto

As expected.

War Is Calling Crypto's 'Neutrality' Into Question

By Wired, March 10, 2022

Whose side is cryptocurrency on? If you had asked Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous person (or persons) who created the Bitcoin platform in 2008, he/they likely would have rejected the question. The whole point of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin was neutrality—the fact that no government, bank, or entity could prevent you from using it, whether you were paying for a pizza, a forbidden book, or a bag of cocaine.

That, of course, started changing as soon as crypto's value made it the perfect medium for criminal transactions, from ransomware to dark net marketplaces. Regulators around the world demanded that exchanges and other "off-ramps" blacklist cryptocurrency from accounts linked to criminal activities or individuals, despite illicit trades accounting for just 0.15 percent of global crypto movements in 2021.

But Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a different matter. Crypto's nature as borderless money, and the abundance of youngish, passionate people sitting on troves of crypto-millions made it a go-to method for Ukraine to raise funds from people outraged by Moscow's actions. At the same time there were fears that government officials and Russian president Vladimir Putin's moneyed inner circle might side-step western sanctions by moving their assets into crypto.

Cryptocurrency exchanges are reportedly blocking all transactions from accounts known to be linked to sanctioned individuals.

Full Article

IBM and Raytheon Collaborate

Collaborative breadth is very interesting

IBM and Raytheon Technologies to Collaborate on Artificial Intelligence, Cryptography and Quantum Technologies

October 11, 2021  in HPCwire

ARMONK, N.Y., Oct. 11, 2021 — IBM and Raytheon Technologies will jointly develop advanced artificial intelligence, cryptographic and quantum solutions for the aerospace, defense and intelligence industries, including the federal government, as part of a strategic collaboration agreement the companies announced today.

Artificial intelligence and quantum technologies give aerospace and government customers the ability to design systems more quickly, better secure their communications networks and improve decision-making processes. By combining IBM’s breakthrough commercial research with Raytheon Technologies’ own research, plus aerospace and defense expertise, the companies will be able to crack once-unsolvable challenges.

“The rapid advancement of quantum computing and its exponential capabilities has spawned one of the greatest technological races in recent history – one that demands unprecedented agility and speed,” said Dario Gil, senior vice president, IBM, and director of Research. “Our new collaboration with Raytheon Technologies will be a catalyst in advancing these state-of-the-art technologies – combining their expertise in aerospace, defense and intelligence with IBM’s next-generation technologies to make discovery faster, and the scope of that discovery larger than ever.”

In addition to artificial intelligence and quantum, the companies will jointly research and develop advanced cryptographic technologies that lie at the heart of some of the toughest problems faced by the aerospace industry and government agencies.

“Take something as fundamental as encrypted communications,” said Mark E. Russell, Raytheon Technologies chief technology officer. “As computing and quantum technologies advance, existing cybersecurity and cryptography methods are at risk of becoming vulnerable. IBM and Raytheon Technologies will now be able to collaboratively help customers maintain secure communications and defend their networks better than previously possible.”

The companies are building a technical collaboration team to quickly insert IBM’s commercial technologies into active aerospace, defense and intelligence programs. The same team will also identify promising technologies for jointly developing long-term system solutions by investing research dollars and talent.  ..."

GRAND Decodes Data Universally?

Implications for general cryptography?      Trying to get a reading. 

Universal System Decodes Any Type of Data Sent Across a Network,   By MIT News,  September 10, 2021  in CACM

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Boston University, and Ireland's Maynooth University have programmed a universal algorithm to enable a silicon chip to decode any data transmitted across a network, irrespective of structure.

The Guessing Random Additive Noise Decoding (GRAND) algorithm removes the need for multiple computationally complex decoders.

GRAND guesses the noise or energy affecting the encoded data en route, and uses this pattern to infer the original information.

The algorithm produces noise sequences in the order they are likely to occur, eliminates them from the received data, and confirms that the resulting codeword is in a codebook.

The researchers say the GRAND chip could decode any moderate redundancy code up to 128 bits long, with approximately 1-microsecond latency.

From MIT News   View Full Article    

Next Wave of Computing Innovation will be Driven by Crypto

 Andreessen Says it will all be about Crypto

Andreessen Horowitz  A16z

Crypto Fund III  by Chris Dixon, Katie Haun, and Ali Yahya

cryptocurrencies & blockchains  a16z crypto  announcements

We believe that the next wave of computing innovation will be driven by crypto. We are radically optimistic about crypto’s potential to restore trust and enable new kinds of governance where communities collectively make important decisions about how networks evolve, what behaviors are permitted, and how economic benefits are distributed. That’s why today we’re pleased to announce a new $2.2 billion fund to continue investing in crypto networks and the founders and teams building in this space. This represents the beginning of an exciting new chapter for the a16z crypto team.

This fund allows us to find the next generation of visionary crypto founders, and invest in the most exciting areas of crypto. We invest in all stages, from early seed-stage projects to fully developed later-stage networks.

Expanding our team to provide unrivaled regulatory and operational capabilities alongside our crypto-native data science and research services.

When we started a16z crypto, our ambition was to bring together a highly specialized and crypto-native team that had never existed in venture capital to support the companies and projects we invest in, help them navigate the complexities of this space, and help projects design crypto protocols and mechanisms. We’ll continue to deepen our focus on the kind of behaviors our entrepreneurs expect from a crypto investor including staking, delegating, running nodes, actively participating in governance and designing mechanisms. We’re expanding our data science and research teams to support this effort. 

As with any new computing movement, crypto has endured a variety of challenges and misconceptions. That’s why we are also bringing together heavy-hitters across several functions to help translate crypto to the mainstream. Our team now includes experts in marketing, public relations, policy, regulatory affairs, recruiting, as well as general startup management. We are promoting Anthony Albanese, who joined us last year from the New York Stock Exchange, to Chief Operating Officer to lead operations.  ....... ' 

Sleuthing Crypto Ransom Payments?

Found this most interesting.   Very  technical look at the approach. Includes all the Wolfram code. reviewing now.  Could this be further developed?  Makes me think about the overall problem.   Contact Wolfram for more information.

DarkSide Update: The FBI Hacks the Hackers?

June 9, 2021

By Dariia Porechna, Cryptography and Blockchain, Wolfram Language Development

In my May 25, 2021, blog post “Sleuthing DarkSide Crypto-Ransom Payments with the Wolfram Language,”   I detailed how I used the Wolfram Language, public knowledge and some guesswork to track crypto-ransom payments made by Colonial Pipeline on May 8 and Brenntag on May 11 to the Russian hacker group DarkSide. These payments, which totaled millions of dollars, were subsequently distributed to different accounts, and on May 13, DarkSide announced it was disbanding.

But the story didn’t end when DarkSide announced its dissolution.

On June 7, the FBI seized 63.7 bitcoin (BTC), approximately $2.3 million USD, from one of the addresses to which DarkSide’s cluster, described in my earlier post, sent their ransom funds. Normally, this should have been inaccessible to anyone without a private key for that address. The FBI apparently managed, however, to obtain one.

Did the FBI run a brute-force attack on a billion-dollar supercomputer to find the private key? For the elliptic curve secp256k1, which Bitcoin is based on, the number of possible private keys for a particular public key is approximately:  .... " 

EU COVID-19 'Digital Pass' Gateway System Goes Live

Following this aspect of construction, delivery and use of passport systems.

EU COVID-19 'Digital Pass' Gateway System Goes Live      By TechCrunch, June 8, 2021

The gateway system for the EU's "digital pass" for verifying COVID-19 vaccination or test status went live June 1.

The digital pass prevents falsifications using QR codes and digital signatures, which are verified using public key cryptography.

Those without access to a mobile device can receive paper-based certificates.

Seven countries—Bulgaria, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Croatia, and Poland—plan to start issuing and verifying certificates, while other member states will begin doing so ahead of the full launch on July 1.

Twenty-two countries have tested the gateway successfully since May 10.

The European Commission has published reference software and apps for the issuance, storage, and verification of certificates on GitHub, with 12 member-states using the code so far.

From TechCrunch  Full article  

Crypto Canon: From Andreessen Horowitz

Very nicely done resource here,  with lots of introductory and related information.

See the Andreessen Crypto Canon:  https://a16z.com/2018/02/10/crypto-readings-resources/    

From Andreessen Horowitz  Crypto Canon  Here’s a list of crypto readings and resources. It’s organized from building blocks and basics; foundations (& history); and key concepts — followed by specific topics such as governance; privacy and security; scaling; consensus and governance; cryptoeconomics, cryptoassets, and investing; ….   Feb 10th, 2018

More generally their Crypto related writings and ongoing coverage are in blog form here: https://a16z.com/crypto/ 

Fast Random Number Generation with Lasers

Fast Random Number Generation with Lasers

Pointer to this in Schneier:       In school one of my particular areas of interest was random number use and leverage.   We detected the fact that a number of available sources of such numbers did a poor job of generating them.   Fast was not as big an idea then as quality back then.    Why? , what are they used for now?   "  Random numbers are widely used for information security, cryptography, stochastic modeling, and quantum simulations.  "   ...  

Post-Quantum Crypto

 Will Quantum be able to cut through Crypto?   Effects on other solution expectations?

The Scramble for Post-Quantum Cryptography

By Samuel Greengard,  Commissioned by CACM Staff,  February 4, 2021

Researchers are working to counter the threat to current communications posed by the nascent quantum computing arena, which could undermine almost all of the encryption protocols used today.

History has demonstrated that where there are people, there are secrets. From elaborately coded messages on paper to today's sophisticated cryptographic algorithms, a desire to maintain privacy has persisted. Of course, as technology has advanced, the ability to cipher messages but also crack the codes has grown.

"Today's encryption methods are excellent, but we are reaching an inflection point," says Chris Peikert, an associate professor in the Department of Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. "The introduction of quantum computing changes the equation completely. In principle, these devices could break any reasonably-sized public key."

Such an event would wreak havoc. "It would affect nearly everything we do with computers," says Dustin Moody, a mathematician whose focus at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) includes computer security. Within this scenario, he says, computing subsystems, virtual private networks (VPNs), and digital signatures would no longer be secure. As a result, personal data, corporate records, intellectual property, and online transactions would all be at risk.

Consequently, cryptographers are developing new encryption standards that would be resistant to the brute force power of quantum computing. At the center of this effort is an initiative at NIST to identify both lattice-based and code-based algorithms that could protect classical computing systems but also introduce new and more advanced capabilities.  ... '

Coders Flock Back to Crypto Projects

 Intriguing direction.  Of the belief that developers will become replaced by automated methods

Coders Flock Back to Crypto Projects with Prices Surging Again

In Bloomberg  By Olga Kharif

Software developers are migrating back to cryptocurrency projects at record levels, with early-stage venture firm Electric Capital reporting that the numbers of new coders rose this year for more than three consecutive months for the first time since 2017. Electric estimated the number of new crypto developers grew 15% per month during the first 10 months of 2020, while more than 80% of all active developers began their work in the last two years. Open source blockchain platform Ethereum and decentralized finance applications are particularly attractive to developers. Electric's Maria Shen said, "Many projects like smart contract platforms rely on developers joining their ecosystem to be successful. Ethereum clearly has more activity and this is why other platforms fight for developers.”

Obfuscating the Indistinguishable in Cryptography

 Below is something I had heard mentioned before, but was unclear of the implications.    Here are a number of statements and article give a good overview.   I am exploring for now.  Not saying I can completely state the implications.  Practitioners in the space should start thinking about it, 

A mouthful of terminology is potentially important to cryptography.    And apparently has now been determined to be possible.  This is written up in a recent Quanta article: 

Computer Scientists Achieve ‘Crown Jewel’ of Cryptography

A cryptographic master tool called indistinguishability obfuscation  (iO)   has for years seemed too good to be true. Three researchers have figured out that it can work.  ....

Schneier writes about it here:

   ....  Basically, obfuscation makes a computer program “unintelligible” by performing its functionality. Indistinguishability obfuscation is more relaxed. It just means that two different programs that perform the same functionality can’t be distinguished from each other. A good definition is in this paper.  

(Schneier)     https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/451.pdf    Definition 

https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1003   Foundational paper of the most recent results

IBM Plans to Deliver Quantum Safe Crypto in Cloud

Much more at the link.  Available at all scales, speeds, needs?

IBM Cloud Delivers Quantum-Safe Cryptography and Hyper Protect Crypto Services to Help Protect Data in the Hybrid Era  in PRNews

IBM brings hybrid cloud leadership together with quantum and security research expertise to stay at the forefront of quantum cybersecurity

Via IBM

ARMONK, N.Y., Nov. 30, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a series of cloud services and technologies designed to help clients maintain the highest available level of cryptographic key encryption protection to help protect existing data in the cloud1 and prepare for future threats that could evolve with advances in quantum computing. Pioneered by IBM Research scientists, the company is now offering quantum-safe cryptography support for key management and application transactions in IBM Cloud®, making it the industry's most holistic quantum-safe cryptography approach to securing data available today.

The new capabilities include:

Quantum Safe Cryptography Support: Through the use of open standards and open source technology, this service enhances the standards used to transmit data between enterprise and Cloud, helping to secure data by using a quantum-safe algorithm.

Extended IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Crypto Services: New capabilities are available to enhance privacy of data in cloud applications, where data sent over the network to cloud applications and sensitive data elements like credit card numbers, are stored in a database that can be encrypted at application-level – supported by the industry's highest level of cryptographic key encryption protection with 'Keep Your Own Key' (KYOK) capability.  .... '

Garbage in - Garbage Forever?

Of course the well known phrase is applicable to many kinds of 'intelligence', analytics, AI and forecasting and inference.   Here we just make sure it goes beyond to methods like blockchain.  Authentication is before, during and after ...  important.

With Blockchain, it’s Garbage In – Garbage Forever  By Avivah Litan   in  Gartner

Many companies across the globe are using or are considering blockchain for tracking assets, proving provenance and eliminating counterfeit products.  But how does anyone know what is being tracked on the blockchain is real to begin with? Just because blockchain data is cryptographically secure doesn’t mean the data is legitimate.

My Gartner colleagues, Scott Smith, Svetlana Sicular, and I delivered a webinar a couple of days ago on Using AI and Blockchain to Detect Fakes in a Zero-Trust World . We discussed the role of blockchain and AI in proving authenticity of any entity, whether it is news, content, photographs, videos, food, pharmaceuticals, shoes, luxury goods, or any ‘thing’ else you can think of. ... '

Bletchley Park Contribution Over-Rated?

 Am a student of this effort, so this suggestion was surprising.

Bletchley Park’s contribution to WW2 'over-rated'

By Gordon Corera, Security correspondent

Code-breaking hub Bletchley Park's contribution to World War Two is often over-rated by the public, an official history of UK spy agency GCHQ says.  The new book - Behind the Enigma - is released on Tuesday and is based on access to top secret GCHQ files.   "Bletchley is not the war winner that a lot of Brits think it is," the author, Professor John Ferris of the University of Calgary, told the BBC.

But he said Bletchley still played an important role.  ... '

Hot areas for Encryption Innovation

Broad look at current activity.

4 hot areas for encryption innovation

Researchers are making progress on a variety of approaches to strengthen encryption techniques and algorithms. Here are some of the hottest areas in cryptographic research.  By Peter Wayner in CSO

Who owns data? Who can read which data? At the center of some of the most vexing problems confronting the internet are a set of encryption algorithms that hold everything together. The routines are mathematically complex and often difficult for even the experts to understand, but stopping fraud, protecting privacy and ensuring accuracy depend implicitly on everyone getting those algorithms right.

Their role in governing cyberspace attracts plenty of researchers who are trying to improve them while also attempting to reveal their weaknesses by breaking them. Some of the newest approaches offer new opportunities to protect everyone with more sophisticated protocols and more robust algorithms. The newest tools bundle better privacy and more agile applications that will do a better job withstanding attacks, including those that might be launched using the largely hypothetical quantum computers

The burgeoning world of cryptocurrencies is also creating opportunities in securing not just money and transactions but all stages of digital workflow. The exploration and innovation devoted to creating blockchains for immortalizing all interactions are some of the most creative and intense areas of computer science today.

The good news is that for all this exciting innovation, the core foundations remain remarkably stable, strong and secure — as long as care is taken implementing them. The standards last decades making it possible for enterprises to rely upon them without recoding or redesigning protocols very often.  ... " 

Quantum Cryptography Explained

A good non-technical, but still challenging explanation of how key-based and then  'quantum cryptography' works.  Also touches on some of the remaining challenges.  In Physics Girl.  Sent via Jeff Dyck.

GPT-3 and Crypto Assets

Just recently been talking digital Assets and how advances in crypto might influence them.  Here a piece from Coindesk that talks some of the issues, considering it.   I am thinking this, let me know if you have comments. Full opinion piece at the link.

Crypto Needn’t Fear GPT-3. It Should Embrace It
Jul 22, 2020 at 17:47 UTC   By Jesus Rodriquez  in Coindesk

Jesus Rodriguez is the CEO of IntoTheBlock, a market intelligence platform for crypto assets. He has held leadership roles at major technology companies and hedge funds. He is an active investor, speaker, author and guest lecturer at Columbia University. 

During the last few days, there has been an explosion of commentary in the crypto community about OpenAI’s new GPT-3 language generator model. Some of the comments express useful curiosity about GPT-3, while others are a bit to the extreme, asserting that the crypto community should be terrified about it. 

The interest is somewhat surprising because the GPT models are not exactly new and they have been making headlines in the machine learning community for over a year now. The research behind the first GPT model was published in June 2018, followed by GPT-2 in February 2019 and most recently GPT-3 two months ago. 

See also: What Is GPT-3 and Should We Be Terrified?

I think it is unlikely that GPT-3 by itself can have a major impact in the crypto ecosystem. However, the techniques behind GPT-3 represent the biggest advancement in deep learning in the last few years and, consequently, can become incredibly relevant to the analysis of crypto-assets. In this article, I would like to take a few minutes to dive into some of the concepts behind GPT-3 and contextualize it to the crypto world.  ....