Cryptography Resources by Matthew Green posted November 2014

I found an old Matthew Green's post where he wrote a really useful list of cryptography blogs and resources

I'll get back here after reading everything.

DPA: Differential Power Analysis posted November 2014

Studying about smartcard there seem to be a lot about whitboxes to learn, since it is indeed a whitebox: the encryption/decryption that are done inside the cards can be analyzed since you own the card. Analysis are separated in different categories like non-intrusive and intrusive. Intrusive because for efficient analysis you would have to remove some part of the plastic covering the interesting parts and directly plug yourself on the chip. This is what Differential Power Analysis (DPA) do, it's a stronger kind of Simple Power Analaysis (SPA).

Kocher & al found out about this in 1998 and released a paper that is still very useful today: http://www.cryptography.com/public/pdf/DPA.pdf

The idea is to record the power consumption of the chip along multiple encryptions. You then obtain curves with pics that you can correlate to XORs operations being performed. You can guess what cipher is used, and where are the known rounds/operations of the cipher from the intensities of some peaks, and the periodicity of some patterns. In the paper they study DES which is still the state of the art for block ciphers then.

Looking at a big number of such curves, along with the messages (or ciphertexts) they encrypted, you can focus on one operation and one bit of the internal state to find out one bit of one of the subkey. One bit should affect the number of XORs being performed thus you should find a correlation between the bit you're looking for and the power consumption at one point. Repeat and find all the other ones. It's powerful because you only need to find one bit of the subkey, one after the other.

It's pretty hard to explain it without pictures (and a video would be even better, that's always something I have been wanting to do, if I dig deeper into it maybe I'll try that). But the basic idea is here, if you want more info check the original paper

Launching in 2015: A Certificate Authority to Encrypt the Entire Web posted November 2014

It was already pretty amazing when Cloudflare introduced Universal SSL (and this blog uses cloudflare ssl by the way).

Today the EFF has launched Let's Encrypt that aims to simplify the setup of SSL. They claim it takes 20-30 seconds to deploy SSL to your server. And this for free.

How to deal with multiple passwords posted November 2014

I was reading some articles on the security blog of stackexchange. Ended up there reading articles/comments from Thomas Pornin who is one of the best answerer on stackoverflow.

I ran into this one intitled Is our entire password strategy flawed?

I wanted to bring my point of view on how to deal with multiple passwords. I don't necessarily do this because it's not practical but I'm trying more and more.

So if I were to be extremely paranoiac I would:

1. use a password manager like 1Password for websites you don’t really care.
2. use passwords you memorise for websites you care about.
3. use multi-factor authentification for critical websites.

1. Password Manager

I've never used 1Password but it seems to generate passwords on the fly when you need to sign up on a new website. It's pretty cool! But a problem arises when you need to login on some website when you're not using your computer. If you don't know the passwords it created then you will always be dependent of this password manager.

2. Memorise

A good idea would be to hash the name of the website + some salt only you know, and use it as a password. All of that in your head. That's what one of the famous Blum proposes. More here. He appeared to have invented a hash you could compute mentally.

3. Two-Factor Authentification

I really like the yubikey (and own one). It's literally a secret key. Every time I need to log into gmail from a cybercafe I wish I had it configured with my yubikey.

Bonus

By the way, if you're scared there might be a keylogger but really have to enter some password you could prey on the fact that the keylogger is badly coded and, when entering your password, could move to another input field and write random words, then come back to the password input field and type some more letters of your password, etc.. . Last year I also learned how to read dotsies (I completely forgot how to read it now though...) and I seldom switched all the fonts to dotsies so no one could look over my shoulder and read what I was reading/typing.

Mathematical “urban legends” posted November 2014

a topic on the math version of stackoverflow, filled with funny stories, anecdotes, urban legends about mathematicians. If you're like me you're gonna love every bit of it.

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/53122/mathematical-urban-legends

Although David Hilbert was one of the first to deal seriously with infinite-dimensional complete inner product spaces, the practice of calling them after him was begun by others, supposedly without his knowledge. The story goes that one day a visitor came to Göttingen and gave a seminar about some theorem on "Hilbert spaces". At the end of the lecture, Hilbert raised his hand and asked, "What is a Hilbert space?"

When the logician Carnap was immigrating to the US, he had the usual consular interview, where one of the questions was (and still is, I think): "Would you favor the overthrow of the US government by violence, or force of arms?". He thought for a while, and responded: "I would have to say force of arms..."

For Sale: 50,000 Bitcoins posted November 2014

Just a few weeks after Silk Road 2.0 and its owner got seized, the US government posted this:

THIS SEALED BID AUCTION IS FOR A PORTION OF THE BITCOINS CONTAINED IN WALLET FILES THAT RESIDED ON CERTAIN COMPUTER HARDWARE BELONGING TO ROSS WILLIAM ULBRICHT, THAT WERE SEIZED ON OR ABOUT OCTOBER 24, 2013 (“COMPUTER HARDWARE BITCOINS”).

http://www.usmarshals.gov/assets/2014/dpr-bitcoins/

Apparently it's from the first Silk Road. Pretty comical.

SineRider: play with functions posted November 2014

Ever fiddled with your TI-8x or played LineRider? Well this guy combined both and it looks awesome!

the game is here: http://sineridergame.com/

The NSA about academic cryptographers posted November 2014

Scott Aaronson found a 1994 issue of Cryptolog an internal newsletter at the NSA. He's quoting funny extracts from one of its article about a field trip at the 1992 Eurocrypt Conference.

Those of you who know my prejudice against the “zero-knowledge” wing of the philosophical camp will be surprised to hear that I enjoyed the three talks of the session better than any of that ilk that I had previously endured. The reason is simple: I took along some interesting reading material and ignored the speakers. That technique served to advantage again for three more snoozers, Thursday’s “digital signature and electronic cash” session, but the final session, also on complexity theory, provided some sensible listening.

more on his blog: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2059

Hack Summit posted November 2014

The next Hack Summit will happen entirely online and will start on December the 1st.

https://hacksummit.org/

You can get a free ticket by posting it on twitter/facebook.

An amazing line up of people will be giving talks: David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Ruby on Rails), Tom Chi (creator of Google Glass), Hakon Wium Le (creator of CSS), Bram Cohen (creator of Bittorrent), Brian Fox (creator of Bash), Hampton Catlin (creator of Sass and Haml), and many more interesting persons and even....... Jon Skeet (#1 answerer on StackOverflow). This is gonna be huge!

Pseudo Random Number Generators using a block cipher in CTR mode posted November 2014

I was wondering why Randomized Algorithm were often more efficient than non-randomized algorithm.

Then I looked at a list of random number generators (or RNG).

Of course we usually talk about PRNG (Pseudo Random Number Generator) since "truly random" is impossible/hard to achieve.

An interesting thing I stumbled into is that you can create a PRNG using a block cipher in counter mode, by iterating the counter and always encrypting the same thing, if the block cipher used is good, it should look random.

This sounds solid since ciphers sometimes need to have Ciphertext Indistinguishability from random noise.

To support such deniable encryption systems, a few cryptographic algorithms are specifically designed to make ciphertext messages indistinguishable from random bit strings

Also under the Ciphertext indistinguishability property that a cipher should respect, you shouldn't be able to find any relations between the ciphertexts coming from the same input but encrypted with an increasing counter.

MicroCorruption posted November 2014

MicroCorruption is a "game" made by Matasano in which you will have to debug some programs in assembly. There is a total of 19 levels and it gets harder and harder by the number. The first levels are made for beginners though! So it seems like a great tool to learn, and that's what our prof Emmanuel Fleury must have thought when he gave us this as homework. One rule: every level is worth one point.

I started writing the solutions here but as people told me "it was unethical to post solutions of a challenge online", I promptly removed them. If someday the challenge will shut down I will post the write ups online so that people can still learn from it :)

Defcon CTF 2009 write up comic posted November 2014

The Sapheads team draw a comic as a write up for the finale of the Defcon CTF in 2009. Since it's a classic here it is

Bitcoin Romania posted November 2014

I was in Bucharest for two weeks and look what I ran into!

http://bitcoinromania.ro/

Elliptic Curves posted October 2014

I feel like I don't write much about my formation, and that it could be useful to people who are wondering about studying Cryptography at Bordeaux University.

There is a good article from a M1 student here: http://journaldumaster.stats.yt/master-csi-presentation/

And as it says there, the master 1 is do-able both for maths and CS people as long as you're willing to catch up in the other subject. There's a lot of theory that will allow you to study more interesting subjects in the second year of Master.

I've talked about some of the subjects but one subject I forgot to talk about was a M1 class: Elliptic Curves, taught by Fabien Pazuki and if you have the chance of taking a class from the guy just do it. He's one of the best math teacher I have had in my life, along with Vincent Borrelli (Surfaces & Curves at Lyon 1) and some dude I can't remember the name of. Each one of them were both really passionate and making true efforts to be pedagogical.

Hack of the Day: How do I run untrusted shell code? posted October 2014

I've run into a nice series of video called "hack of the day" from Vivek-Ramachandran.

In this first video he explains two techniques :

• jump-call-pop
• xor decoding

I also got nice tips like the examining string function in gdb : x/s $ebx or the folder usr/include/asm that contains plenty of information about assembly.

The full playlist can be found on securitytube.net