“ There was a bug in an OpenPGP library which finally gave us an excuse to tear encrypted email via PGP to shreds. Our special guest William Woodruff joined us to help explain the vuln and indulge our gnashing of teeth on why email was never meant to be encrypted and how other modern tools do the job much, much better.”
Readit Newssweis commented on Stop Using Encrypted Email securitycryptographywhate... · Posted by u/sweis
sweis commented on How to pack ternary numbers in 8-bit bytes compilade.net/blog/ternar... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
I dug into this once and the "theoretical ideal" of 3 originated in a 1950s paper about vacuum tube computers, which itself immediately backed off and said the choice of base 2 is frequently justified.
https://sweis.medium.com/revisiting-radix-economy-8f642d9f3c...
In this case, the context are {-1, 0, 1} weights in a LLM model, which I don't think is being used for any hardware efficiency argument. I think it's just quantizing weights into 3 states.
sweis commented on Operation Triangulation: What you get when attack iPhones of researchers securelist.com/operation-... · Posted by u/ruik
The video of the talk is online now too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VWNUUldBEE
sweis commented on IBM demonstrates 133-qubit Heron tomshardware.com/tech-ind... · Posted by u/rbanffy
For cracking 1024 bit RSA, I believe we need on the order of 10,000 qubits.
So we are 1% of the way there!
The best estimate I've seen is that we need about 5-7 orders of magnitude more qubits and 1-2 orders of magnitude lower error rates:
https://sam-jaques.appspot.com/quantum_landscape_2023
sweis commented on OpenSSH 9.5 released with keystroke timing obfuscation lwn.net/Articles/946497/... · Posted by u/surteen
Strange, I didn't expect Rambus to be involved in cryptography, nor that they would give away the spec and implementation. I guess it was designed to be a smaller die-area solution for some of their silicon IP products, and opening it up just makes it more convenient for their customers to use. (And, hopefully, nobody is stupid enough to use some vendor's secret proprietary crypto in their chips).
I'd be interested to read a history of Rambus. They're a strange and somewhat controversial company. I lived through the controversy but I'm not certain I remember it correctly. From what I remember they patented some things related to DDR SDRAM, I'm not sure how much credit they deserve for developing those things or if they were just first to file. For part of the Pentium 4's lifecycle they convinced Intel to use Rambus' proprietary DRAM (RDRAM) which supposedly had some benefits but I just remember being overpriced. They shook down DDR manufacturers for patent licensing fees. Apparently the EU opened an antitrust investigation into them for getting their patents into the standard and then not licensing them freely enough. I'm not sure it's fair to call them a patent troll but I guess they're something similar to Fraunhofer or Synopsis.
Rambus bought Cryptography Research about 12 years ago:
https://www.rambus.com/rambus-completes-acquisition-of-crypt...
sweis commented on Debunking NIST's calculation of the Kyber-512 security level blog.cr.yp.to/20231003-co... · Posted by u/bumbledraven
Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG
Also, we still to this day do not know where the seed for P256 and P384 came from. And we're using that everywhere. There is a non-zero chance that the NSA basically has a backdoor for all NIST ECC curves, and no one actually seems to care.
NIST P-256 curve seed came from the X9.62 specification drafted in 1997. It was provided by an NSA employee, Jerry Solinas, as an example seed among many other seeds, including those provided by Certicom. Read this for more details: https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1018
sweis commented on Debunking NIST's calculation of the Kyber-512 security level blog.cr.yp.to/20231003-co... · Posted by u/bumbledraven
Unfortunately, the NSA & NIST most likely is recommending a quantum-proof security that they've developed cryptanalysis against, either through high q-bit proprietary technology or specialized de-latticing algorithms .
The NSA is very good at math, so I'm be thoroughly surprised if this analysis was error by mistake rather than error through intent.
"High q-bit proprietary technology" and "specialized de-latticing algorithms" are made up terms that nobody uses.
sweis commented on How were the NIST ECDSA curve parameters generated? saweis.net/posts/nist-cur... · Posted by u/sweis
A post talking about how Jerry Solinas provided the NIST ECDSA curve parameters and anecdotes of how they were chosen.