cryptography fm by Symbolic Software

For several years, CryptoHack has been a free platform for learning modern cryptography through fun and challenging programming puzzles. From toy ciphers to post-quantum cryptography, CryptoHack has a wide-ranging and ever increasing library of puzzles for both the aspiring and accomplished cryptographer. On this episode, Nadim and Lucas are joined by Giacomo Pope and Laurence Tennant, the founders of CryptoHack, to discuss how the platform came to be, and how it evolved, as well as how to improve cryptographic pedagogy more broadly. Special Guests: Giacomo Pope and Laurence Tennant.

On April 19th 2022, Neil Madden disclosed a vulnerability in many popular Java runtimes and development kits. The vulnerability, dubbed "Psychic Signatures", lies in the cryptography for ECDSA signatures and allows an attacker to bypass signature checks entirely for these signatures. How are popular cryptographic protocol implementations in Java affected? What's the state of Java cryptography as a whole? Join Neil, Nadim and Lucas as they discuss.

Threema is a Swiss encrypted messaging application. It has more than 10 million users and more than 7000 on-premise customers. Prominent users of Threema include the Swiss Government and the Swiss Army, as well as the current Chancellor of Germany, Olaf Scholz. Threema has been widely advertised as a secure alternative to other messengers.

Benjamin Wesolowski talks about his latest paper in which he mathematically proved that the two fundamental problems underlying isogeny-based cryptography are equivalent.

A team of cryptanalysits presents the first publicly available cryptanalytic attacks on the GEA-1 and GEA-2 algorithms. Instead of providing full 64-bit security, they show that the initial state of GEA-1 can be recovered from as little as 65 bits of known keystream (with at least 24 bits coming from one frame) in time 240 GEA-1 evaluations and using 44.5 GiB of memory. The attack on GEA-1 is based on an exceptional interaction of the deployed LFSRs and the key initialization, which is highly unlikely to occur by chance. This unusual pattern indicates that the weakness is intentionally hidden to limit the security level to 40 bit by design.

TLS is an internet standard to secure the communication between servers and clients on the internet, for example that of web servers, FTP servers, and Email servers. This is possible because TLS was designed to be application layer independent, which allows its use in many diverse communication protocols.

Nadim talks with Peter Schwabe and Matthias Kannwischer about the considerations — both in terms of security and performance — when implementing cryptographic primitives for low-level and embedded platforms.

Wi-Fi is a pretty central technology to our daily lives, whether at home or at the office. Given that so much sensitive data is regularly exchanged between Wi-Fi devices, a number of standards have been developed to ensure the privacy and authentication of Wi-Fi communications.

Contact discovery is a core feature in popular mobile messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram that lets users grant access to their address book in order to discover which of their contacts are on that messaging service. While contact discovery is critical for WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram to function properly, privacy concerns arise with the current methods and implementations of this feature, potentially resulting in the exposure of a range of sensitive information about users and their social circle.

Secure multi-party computation is a fascinating field in cryptography, researching how to allow multiple parties to compute secure operations over inputs while keeping those inputs private. This makes multi-party computation a super relevant technology in areas such as code signing, hospital records and more.

On March 1st, 2021, a curious paper appeared on the Cryptology ePrint Archive: senior cryptographer Claus Peter Schnorr submitted research that claims to use lattice mathematics to improve the fast factoring of integers so much that he was able to completely “destroy the RSA cryptosystem” -- certainly a serious claim.

Zero-Knowledge proofs have broadened the realm of use cases for applied cryptography over the past decade, from privacy-enhanced cryptocurrencies to applications in voting, finance, protecting medical data and more. In 2018, Dr. Eli Ben-Sasson and his team introduced ZK-STARKs, a new zero-knowledge construction that functions without trusted setup, thereby broadening what zero-knowledge systems are capable of. We’ll talk about ZK-STARKs and more with Eli in this episode of Cryptography FM.

Every year, the IACR Real World Cryptography symposium brings together researchers, engineers and practitioners in applied cryptography to discuss cryptography that matters, in the real world. To me, this is the big one! The one cryptography conference that matters the most. Who needs proceedings when you’ve got so much excitement in the air, and so many results and projects that actually have a measurable impact on how cryptography affects the real world?

The race for post-quantum cryptographic signature primitives is in its final lap over at NIST, which recently announced DILITHIUM, FALCON and Rainbow as the three signature primitive finalists. But a paper recently published by KU Leuven researcher Ward Beullens claims to find serious weaknesses in the security of Rainbow, one of those three finalists. In fact, the paper claims that the weaknesses are so severe that Rainbow’s security parameters now fall short of the security requirements set out by the NIST post-quantum competition.

Authenticated encryption such as AES-GCM or ChaCha20-Poly1305 is used in a wide variety of applications, including potentially in settings for which it was not originally designed. A question given relatively little attention is whether an authenticated encryption scheme guarantees “key commitment”: the notion that ciphertext should decrypt to a valid plaintext only under the key that was used to generate the ciphertext.

Before there was Signal, before there was WhatsApp, the realm of secure encrypted messaging was ruled by the Off-the-Record secure messaging protocol, created as an alternative to PGP that introduced security properties like forward secrecy and deniability that were considered exotic at the time.

Elliptic-curve signatures have become a highly used cryptographic primitive in secure messaging, TLS as well as in cryptocurrencies due to their high speed benefits over more traditional signature schemes. However, virtually all signature schemes are known to be susceptible to misuse, especially when information about the nonce is leaked to an attacker.

Secure messaging protocols like Signal have succeeded at making end-to-end encryption the norm in messaging more generally. Whether you’re using WhatsApp, Wire, Facebook Messenger’s Secret Chat feature, or Signal itself, you’re benefiting from end-to-end encryption across all of your messages and calls, and it’s so transparent that most users aren’t even aware of it!

Zero-knowledge proofs have been a notorious research target ever since Zcash and other cryptocurrencies have invented lots of new use cases for them. Range proofs, bullet proofs, you name it – all kinds of zero-knowledge mechanisms have received more and more attention.

The NIST post-quantum competition has started a race for post-quantum cryptography. As a result, we’ve seen a great deal of research into alternative hard mathematical problems to use as a basis for public-key cryptography schemes. Lattice-based cryptography! Error-correcting code based cryptography! And of course, isogeny-based cryptography, have all received enormous renewed interest as a result.

Anyone who’s looked at the French civil code -- or, God forbid, the French tax code -- will tell you that it takes more than a mere human mind to decipher its meaning, given how it’s been growing and growing ever since it was established by Napoleon hundreds of years ago.

Ever since its introduction in 2012, the BLAKE hash function has been reputed for achieving performance matching and even exceeding MD5 while still maintaining a high security margin.

Aside from working on a competition for standardizing post-quantum primitives, the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, has also organized a lightweight cryptography competition meant to attract designs for symmetric primitives, such as hash functions and authenticated encryption ciphers, that work in use cases where even AES is not an adequately speedy standard.

TLS 1.3 has been widely praised as a major upgrade to the Transport Layer Security protocol responsible for securing the majority of Web traffic. But one area in which TLS 1.3 seems to be lacking is its potential for resistance to attacks that utilize quantum computing – computers that, theoretically, could factor the products of large primes and solve the discrete logarithm problem in relatively short periods of time, significantly affecting the security of TLS 1.3.