Friday, August 4, 2006
A paper by Brandi Dawn Brown (now Brandi Hollis) about the the enigma cipher machine.
Tuesday, September 8, 2005
Here are some articles that I found on the web about the vulerablity of
a hashing function which is commonly used in modern cryptographic
applications. These all appeared in newspapers in March of 2005
although I don't have exact references for the dates of their
publication for all of them.
In case you have doubts about the relevancy of hash functions to
everyday life, here is a followup story dated August 12, 2005 about how
this flaw was exploited to get out of a traffic ticket. Builders UK.
The codes discussed in those articles are in a family called
Secure Hash Algorithm or SHA. They are generally used to digitally sign a
document by producing a code which is unique to that document.
Documents can be authenticated as long as every one is sent to a
unique signature, the problem arises when there are 'collisions' or two
documents are assigned the same hash value.
The vulernability reported early this
year was with SHA-0. Here is an article dated August 2005 which
says that the more secure brother of this algorithm, SHA-1,
might be less secure than orginally thought. The article says that
this algorithm was going to be phased out in 2010 but this news
could speed up that timetable.
Security Focus.
Friday September 23, 2005
In the
Globe and Mail
the other day there was an article about a
researcher at U of Toronto who is doing work in quantum cryptography.
Our class is still talking about historical ciphers and how to break
them, we will learn a little 'modern cryptography' (public key) later this term,
and quantum cryptography is really modern in that the
mathematics and engineering needed to make it work hasn't been
developed yet.
