Steve Weis @sweis Twitter profile

Last Seen Profiles

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@AmcDarkPool

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@Char1112

@_shortaroo_

@dioceseoflondon

@comix_chris

@SissyQueen123

@jillian_molli

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@UGSDW

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@SunstoneMassage

@AUH

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@DemonSlayerSc

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@CDN37

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@arbonne

@asabfb

@anopensecret_

@waqas32dar

@guchi_0614RB

@WolfSkullJack

@OceaniaCruises

@9l599

@benawad

@CoreyAtad

Steve Weis

@sweis

5 years

Is it weird to be jealous of the corporate dystopia workspaces from 1990s movies? Neo would be sharing that space with 4 people in an open office plan today.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

8 months

This iMessage exploit is crazy. TrueType vulnerability that has existed since the 90s, 2 kernel exploits, a browser exploit, and an undocumented hardware feature that was not used in shipped software:

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Steve Weis

@sweis

2 years

“We were not hacked.” “There was a hacking attempt.” “We were hacked, but it doesn't matter.” “2.5% of you were hacked.” “Getting hacked is actually good.” “I’m glad we were hacked.”

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Steve Weis

@sweis

3 years

Berkshire Hathaway just hit $429,496.7295 and now Warren Buffet is broke.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

3 years

Visualization of Facebook withdrawing its ASN, made with and Yakety Sax.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

3 years

Classic Buffet Overflow attack.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

5 months

Was Copilot trained on Uber's leaked code base? I named the file "" and it suggested the comment and what looks like an internal URL. Maybe that's a complete hallucination.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

2 months

If Google Project Zero finds a bug and your favorite intelligence agency finds a bug, someone you don't like will find the bug will too.

Michael Coppola

@mncoppola

2 months

New blog post "Google: Stop Burning Counterterrorism Operations" My reflection on an incident where Project Zero and TAG knowingly shut down an active Western counterterrorism cyber operation, and the real-world harm that could have resulted from it.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

6 years

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Steve Weis

@sweis

3 years

This job is still available and pays 1 monkey JPEGs.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

5 years

"I've received tenure at Harvard! I want to thank all of the enemies that I had to destroy to achieve this great honor..."

Tenure announcement: April 2019

mickens.seas.harvard.edu

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Steve Weis

@sweis

4 years

Reviewer #2 rejected a paper with the comment “Unrealistic problems. Unrealistic solutions.” for something running in production at a global scale for 2 years.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

6 years

Grad student tip: Find an advisor who will hire the A-Team to rescue you from ISIS in order to finish your thesis.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

6 years

NIST Blockchain technology overview: tl;dr: You don't need a blockchain.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

5 years

Who wore it better?

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Steve Weis

@sweis

4 years

NATO released a "Malware Reverse Engineering Handbook":

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Steve Weis

@sweis

5 months

Turns out Copilot just likes to make things up.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

2 years

Buffer overflow in SHA-3 “official” implementation:

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Steve Weis

@sweis

5 years

RSA factoring recap since shady people are making dumb claims right now. Caveat: They used to use decimal digits for RSA key lengths, so "RSA-100" was 330 bits. 1. 256-bit RSA keys were factorable in the 1980s.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

8 months

@oconnor663 This wasn't a proof of concept exploit. It was found in the wild being used in practice.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

2 years

Pour one out for SGX

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Steve Weis

@sweis

8 months

The talk mentions that the malware it dropped looks like it has existed for 10 years, collects everything, and uses Apple's client-side image recognition.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

6 years

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Steve Weis

@sweis

8 months

The talk is online here:

Operation Triangulation: What You Get When Attack iPhones of Resear...

Streamdump of oct0xor, kucher1n and bzvr_ talk at #37c3 about Operation Triangulation!

www.youtube.com

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Steve Weis

@sweis

8 months

@cansimitus No. The "scare quotes" make me think you may be misreading this as an intentionally shipped backdoor. They were unused registers in the SoC that the post authors speculate were for debugging.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

8 months

Hector Martin (marcan) has some good ideas that the iMessage exploit used dbgwrap and cache debugging registers. He also talks about how the "sbox" design is very clearly an ECC or CRC and not intended to obfuscate anything.

Hector Martin (@[email protected])

So some fun stuff was just presented at 37C3, and... I bet I have some answers. https://securelist.com/operation-triangulation-the-last-hardware-mystery/111669/ First, yeah, the dbgwrap stuff makes...

social.treehouse.systems

Steve Weis

@sweis

8 months

This Mastodon post by Hector Martin talks about some ideas about the hardware feature that was used:

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Steve Weis

@sweis

3 years

“All the Numbers are US: Large-scale Abuse of Contact Discovery in Mobile Messengers” 100% of US numbers queried for Signal. 10% of US numbers for WhatsApp.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

3 years

Discovering a CPU bug is the worst because after proving how smart you are, you are still stuck with a broken CPU.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

5 years

“Dsng & dvlop test automatn sftwre for cmpter systems”? Apple saving $6 by avoiding vowels in the classified section of a free community paper.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

7 years

Google released new Tink crypto library: From Thai Duong, Daniel Bleichenbacher, Bartosz Przydatek, & Quan Nguyen

GitHub - tink-crypto/tink: Tink is a multi-language, cross-platform, open source library that...

Tink is a multi-language, cross-platform, open source library that provides cryptographic APIs that are secure, easy to use correctly, and hard(er) to misuse. - tink-crypto/tink

github.com

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Steve Weis

@sweis

8 years

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Steve Weis

@sweis

8 months

...research by @oct0xor , @bzvr_ , and @kucher1n and presented at ccc:

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Steve Weis

@sweis

5 years

892-bit RSA (historically called RSA-250 in decimal digits), and has been factored by Boudot, Gaudry, Guillevic, Heninger, Thome, and Zimmermann using CADO-NFS and 2700 core-years: This is a new RSA factoring challenge record:

RSA Factoring Challenge - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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Steve Weis

@sweis

8 months

@knaversr @x0rz "Non-obvious" is a pretty big understatement. The fact they had to use such a complex chain of multiple vulnerabilities and undocumented hardware features is a good sign.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

8 years

TPM 1.2 only supports SHA-1 and uses hashes to attest firmware and BIOS. Collisions could defeat trusted boot.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

2 years

USPS is releasing “Women Cryptologists of World War II” stamps in October:

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Steve Weis

@sweis

2 years

Cryptography II is the Duke Nukem Forever of online courses.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

4 years

I periodically compile the most cited security, privacy, and cryptography papers of the last few years. Here's 2015-2019: Lots of machine learning privacy, blockchains, and speculative execution attacks.

Most Cited Security Papers from 2015–2019

Highly cited academic security, privacy, and cryptography papers from 2015–2019.

sweis.medium.com

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Steve Weis

@sweis

5 years

INRIA team & @nadiaheninger claim to have factored 795-bit RSA keys using a Number Field Sieve: CADO-NFS software that was used is here:

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Steve Weis

@sweis

2 years

Java 15 ECDSA will accept (0, 0) as a valid signature on anything.

CVE-2022-21449: Psychic Signatures in Java

The long-running BBC sci-fi show Doctor Who has a recurring plot device where the Doctor manages to get out of trouble by showing an identity card which is actually completely blank. Of course, thi…

neilmadden.blog

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Steve Weis

@sweis

6 years

Microsoft released the Simple Encrypted Arithmetic Library (SEAL), which is a homomorphic encryption library written in C++:

GitHub - microsoft/SEAL: Microsoft SEAL is an easy-to-use and powerful homomorphic encryption...

Microsoft SEAL is an easy-to-use and powerful homomorphic encryption library. - microsoft/SEAL

github.com

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Steve Weis

@sweis

3 years

This Google SRE book has a good intro story about cascading failures:

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Steve Weis

@sweis

5 years

@dguido How do you stop 30-50 feral quasi-primes in under 3 minutes without Time AI?

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Steve Weis

@sweis

6 years

"An Intensive Introduction to Cryptography" by Boaz Barak:

An intensive introduction to cryptography

Lecture notes on Cryptography by Boaz Barak

intensecrypto.org

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Steve Weis

@sweis

4 months

We are so back.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

6 months

I love how Phil Rogaway is invited to keynote a NIST workshop on Block Cipher Modes of operation and just goes hard with "Is humanity worth saving?"

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Steve Weis

@sweis

5 years

If you want to work on in- fra projects in ma- trix organization please mail in a hard copy of your resume, which will be promptly put into the eco-friendly recycling bin.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

8 months

This Mastodon post by Hector Martin talks about some ideas about the hardware feature that was used:

Hector Martin (@[email protected])

So some fun stuff was just presented at 37C3, and... I bet I have some answers. https://securelist.com/operation-triangulation-the-last-hardware-mystery/111669/ First, yeah, the dbgwrap stuff makes...

social.treehouse.systems

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Steve Weis

@sweis

5 years

Narrator: Quantum supremacy does not mean that no code is crackable. (Post-quantum resistant crypto has been around since at least 1978.)

Andrew Yang🧢⬆️🇺🇸

@AndrewYang

5 years

Google achieving quantum computing is a huge deal. It means, among many other things, that no code is uncrackable.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

1 year

SGX ain’t freeing the slaves, Intel.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

5 years

Why did Apple decide to use 1280-bit RSA for iMessage?

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Steve Weis

@sweis

6 years

The most entertaining cryptocurrency in the world uses XOR for authenticated encryption.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

3 years

Nice SHA-256 visual explanation:

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Steve Weis

@sweis

1 year

The news clip of @aloria 's crossover hacker typing was perfect.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

5 years

Google and Facebook splashed out for a few more vowels.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

3 years

@LauraEdelson2 Did Ad Observer collect people’s data without consent and share it publicly, as Facebook is claiming? If so, was it by design or by accident?

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Steve Weis

@sweis

4 years

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Steve Weis

@sweis

6 years

"Compact Multi-Signatures for Smaller Blockchains" by Dan Boneh and Manu Drijvers and Gregory Neven: "Designed to reduce the size of the Bitcoin blockchain" & "suited for compressing the data needed to spend funds from a t-of-n Multisig Bitcoin address"

Compact Multi-Signatures for Smaller Blockchains

We construct new multi-signature schemes that provide new functionality. Our schemes are designed to reduce the size of the Bitcoin blockchain, but are useful in many other settings where multi-sig...

eprint.iacr.org

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Steve Weis

@sweis

6 years

#OurSA speakers are top notch, but they are scraping the bottom of the barrel for badge patrol.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

5 years

They weren't my top choice, but I will still vote for 500 Internal Server Error if they go on to win the nomination.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

3 months

Apple announced a Private Cloud Compute using RSA blind signatures for pseudonymized access, publishing all software images for research, and publishing a transparency log of all running, attested code:

Blog - Private Cloud Compute: A new frontier for AI privacy in the cloud - Apple Security Research

Secure and private AI processing in the cloud poses a formidable new challenge. To support advanced features of Apple Intelligence with larger foundation models, we created Private Cloud Compute...

security.apple.com

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Steve Weis

@sweis

6 years

S/MIME is the buried lede in #efail . S/MIME is much bigger than PGP and is widely used throughout government and military. It has more vulnerable backchannels like X.509 and OCSP that are harder to fix.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

7 years

Just noticed @__apf__ in MIT Tech Review 35 Under 35:

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Steve Weis

@sweis

5 years

Clown Sterling demonstrating the peak of 1980s technology by factoring 256 bits. (Spoiler: Lenstra factored 330 bits in 1991.)

Sean Gallagher ⚡️🐀

@thepacketrat

5 years

Sooooo. Anyone available to comment on this?

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Steve Weis

@sweis

9 years

"A Practical Cryptanalysis of the Telegram Protocol", Jakob Jakobsen Masters' thesis:

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Steve Weis

@sweis

5 years

Will all the quantum supremacy talk, I made this history of quantum computers factoring with Shor's algorithm. Today's devices have 50-100 qubits and no error-correction. To factor practical RSA keys with Shor's, we might need millions of physical qubits for error correction.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

5 years

@cybergibbons I wrote up this worksheet to help when talking to people about threats:

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Steve Weis

@sweis

6 years

Google's Adiantum is a length-preserving encryption composition suitable for disk encryption on ARM and non-x86 architectures: It's now in Linux 5.0:

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Steve Weis

@sweis

6 years

Friday is my last day at Facebook. Thanks to everyone on the privacy and security teams whom I had the opportunity to work with. I'm planning to take some time off before deciding what's next...

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Steve Weis

@sweis

7 years

Yubico finally has a Yubikey 4C Nano for UBS-C:

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Steve Weis

@sweis

9 years

The most honest explanation of a language's syntax in the history of computer science: http://t.co/8ojnuFvEU5 http://t.co/LYrOmMg2aq

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Steve Weis

@sweis

3 years

An Intensive Introduction to Cryptography course by @boazbaraktcs :

An intensive introduction to cryptography

Lecture notes on Cryptography by Boaz Barak

intensecrypto.org

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Steve Weis

@sweis

4 months

It's so over. (It's an improved reduction to break NTRU lattices that was conjectured 18 years ago by Phong Q. Nguyen.)

Improved Provable Reduction of NTRU and Hypercubic Lattices

Lattice-based cryptography typically uses lattices with special properties to improve efficiency. We show how blockwise reduction can exploit lattices with special geometric properties, effectively...

eprint.iacr.org

Steve Weis

@sweis

4 months

We are so back.

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7 years

Facebook offering grants up to $100k to "Secure the Internet": Suggested Topics: - Abuse detection and reporting - Anti-phishing - Post-password authentication - Privacy preserving technologies - Security for users in emerging markets - User safety

Secure the Internet Grants request for proposals - Meta Research | Meta Research

Facebook is pleased to invite submissions for Secure the Internet Grant proposals from university researchers and faculty, non-profit organizations, and NGOs for applied research proposals to improve...

research.facebook.com

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Steve Weis

@sweis

5 years

"Breaking the encryption scheme of the Moscow internet voting system" which is based on Ethereum smart contracts, by Pierrick Gaudry from @labo_Loria : Vulnerable JavaScript source code here:

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Steve Weis

@sweis

6 years

VW's firmware was used to defeat emissions tests: Their response should be independently auditable, reproducible firmware updates. Instead, they are relying on a system with a track record of broken, homegrown crypto for critical firmware updates.

Johann Jungwirth

@JohannJungwirth

6 years

Volkswagen, together with @iotatoken will show at #cebit18 a proof of concept how the trusted transfer of software over-the-air to vehicles can be securely documented using the #tangle . Great example how distributed ledger technology can be used in the future

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Steve Weis

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10 months

There is a claim floating around of someone claiming to have factored a RSA-2048 modulus using a quantum computer. It is not credible. The current quantum computer factoring record still stands as the number 21=3*7.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

6 years

Googlers: What does "double-blind encryption technology" mean? Private set intersection? Sharing hashes of identifiers?

Google and Mastercard Cut a Secret Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales

Google found the perfect way to link online ads to store purchases: credit card data

www.bloomberg.com

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Steve Weis

@sweis

4 years

The IRS is offering a $625k contract for tools to break privacy for Monero and other cryptocurrencies:

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Steve Weis

@sweis

10 years

http://t.co/H8L5zlMCrK

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Steve Weis

@sweis

5 years

9. In 2019, almost nobody should be using RSA for new projects. The exceptions are very rare and will have to upgrade soon anyway.

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Steve Weis

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7 years

This is my current to-read list for cryptocurrency / consensus papers: Bulletproofs: zk-STARKS: Overcoming Crypto Impossibility Results using Blockchains: Compact ECash: 1/2

Overcoming Cryptographic Impossibility Results using Blockchains

Blockchain technology has the potential to disrupt how cryptography is done. In this work, we propose to view blockchains as an "enabler", much like indistinguishability obfuscation (Barak et al.,...

eprint.iacr.org

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Steve Weis

@sweis

9 years

Keybase.io e2e encrypted filesystem:

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Steve Weis

@sweis

6 years

Top 100 crypto papers by citation, normalized by age:

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Steve Weis

@sweis

3 years

"Did Schnorr destroy RSA? Show me the factors." The Schnorr paper claims runtimes that should be able to factor well known open challenges. Setting a new record would give it more credibility.

Did Schnorr destroy RSA? Show me the factors.

Schnorr has claimed new factoring methods that “destroy RSA”. This should be easy to demonstrate with well known challenges.

sweis.medium.com

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Steve Weis

@sweis

2 years

Google LaTeXify package is neat. It generates LaTeX formulas from Python code:

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Steve Weis

@sweis

6 years

USB-C standards body announced an cryptographic authentication protocol for chargers and devices: I can't find technical details yet.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

7 years

The NRO left a drone video feed open to the internet: It's target someone's yacht right now: http://98.188.203.187

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Steve Weis

@sweis

5 years

NIST does not have any documents on how it came up with NIST's standard elliptic curve parameters: These seeds came from the NSA in the late 1990s, likely from Jerry Solinas. This is most likely not ominous, but just an open question.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

6 years

I think I got root on this frozen yogurt machine. Where should I submit a stunt hack talk? Any journalist who wants the exclusive, you must agree to use the title "Fro Yo? Oh No!". This is non-negotiable.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

8 years

The NSA has its own Secure Communications Interoperability Protocol for phones. This is the webpage...

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Steve Weis

@sweis

3 years

Every internet discussion about cryptographic entropy summed up for you.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

3 years

Facebook's internal tooling is all built on the Facebook platform. People are probably coordinating over IRC and phone calls to get it back up right now. Gen X engineers, this is your moment.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

5 years

Zoom's ZoomOpener has some suspect crypto stuff. It's doing raw SHA-256 hashes of device IDs for something and "zoomCryptoWithTimes" that is doing something with SHA-256. Also a "runAsCommand" that I hope doesn't run any command.

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Steve Weis

@sweis

3 years

@anishathalye This does not reverse and recover the original image, though. It’s adding in details that don’t exist in the original and generating nearby approximation. This can fail badly:

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Steve Weis

@sweis

7 years

New "Serious Crypto" book by @veorq :

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Steve Weis

@sweis

7 years

The IOTA creator @c___f___b claims his non-collision resistant Curl-P hash function is the output of a "classified" evolutionary algorithm. The search space of the state is tiny. I'm guessing he just tried random sboxes.