Topic: Cryptography/Computer science
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π Illegal prime
An illegal prime is a prime number that represents information whose possession or distribution is forbidden in some legal jurisdictions. One of the first illegal primes was found in 2001. When interpreted in a particular way, it describes a computer program that bypasses the digital rights management scheme used on DVDs. Distribution of such a program in the United States is illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. An illegal prime is a kind of illegal number.
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- "Illegal Prime Numbers" | 2021-04-12 | 218 Upvotes 107 Comments
- "Illegal prime" | 2018-04-27 | 267 Upvotes 192 Comments
- "Illegal prime" | 2016-11-22 | 39 Upvotes 26 Comments
- "Illegal prime number" | 2014-07-30 | 59 Upvotes 30 Comments
- "Illegal Prime Numbers" | 2013-10-17 | 178 Upvotes 58 Comments
- "Illegal prime" | 2010-01-11 | 152 Upvotes 76 Comments
π Alan Turing's 100th Birthday - Mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, scientist
Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912Β β 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. Despite these accomplishments, he was not fully recognised in his home country during his lifetime, due to his homosexuality, and because much of his work was covered by the Official Secrets Act.
During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre that produced Ultra intelligence. For a time he led Hut 8, the section that was responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. Here, he devised a number of techniques for speeding the breaking of German ciphers, including improvements to the pre-war Polish bombe method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine.
Turing played a crucial role in cracking intercepted coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis in many crucial engagements, including the Battle of the Atlantic, and in so doing helped win the war. Due to the problems of counterfactual history, it is hard to estimate the precise effect Ultra intelligence had on the war, but at the upper end it has been estimated that this work shortened the war in Europe by more than two years and saved over 14Β million lives.
After the war Turing worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he designed the Automatic Computing Engine. The Automatic Computing Engine was one of the first designs for a stored-program computer. In 1948 Turing joined Max Newman's Computing Machine Laboratory, at the Victoria University of Manchester, where he helped develop the Manchester computers and became interested in mathematical biology. He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis and predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the BelousovβZhabotinsky reaction, first observed in the 1960s.
Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts; the Labouchere Amendment of 1885 had mandated that "gross indecency" was a criminal offence in the UK. He accepted chemical castration treatment, with DES, as an alternative to prison. Turing died in 1954, 16 days before his 42nd birthday, from cyanide poisoning. An inquest determined his death as a suicide, but it has been noted that the known evidence is also consistent with accidental poisoning.
In 2009, following an Internet campaign, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for "the appalling way he was treated". Queen Elizabeth II granted Turing a posthumous pardon in 2013. The Alan Turing law is now an informal term for a 2017 law in the United Kingdom that retroactively pardoned men cautioned or convicted under historical legislation that outlawed homosexual acts.
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- "Alan Turing died 70 years ago" | 2024-06-07 | 103 Upvotes 136 Comments
- "Alan Turing's 100th Birthday - Mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, scientist" | 2012-06-22 | 146 Upvotes 19 Comments
- "Happy Birthday, Alan Turing" | 2011-06-23 | 78 Upvotes 6 Comments
π _NSAKEY
_NSAKEY was a variable name discovered in an operating system from Microsoft in 1999. The variable contained a 1024-bit public key; such keys are used in cryptography for encryption and authentication. Due to the name it was speculated that the key was owned by the United States National Security Agency (the NSA) which would allow the intelligence agency to subvert any Windows user's security. Microsoft denied the speculation and said that the key's name came from the NSA being the technical review authority for U.S. cryptography export controls.
The key was discovered in a Windows NT 4 Service Pack 5 (which had been released unstripped of its symbolic debugging data) in August 1999 by Andrew D. Fernandes of Cryptonym Corporation.
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- "_NSAKEY" | 2022-01-29 | 15 Upvotes 1 Comments
- "_NSAKEY" | 2020-01-14 | 254 Upvotes 109 Comments
- "Microsoft _NSAKEY" | 2019-01-03 | 18 Upvotes 2 Comments
- "_NSAKEY (1999)" | 2013-07-12 | 8 Upvotes 10 Comments
π Zooko's Triangle
Zooko's triangle is a trilemma of three properties that are generally considered desirable for names of participants in a network protocol:
- Human-meaningful: Meaningful and memorable (low-entropy) names are provided to the users.
- Secure: The amount of damage a malicious entity can inflict on the system should be as low as possible.
- Decentralized: Names correctly resolve to their respective entities without the use of a central authority or service.
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- "Zooko's Triangle" | 2022-08-17 | 79 Upvotes 40 Comments
- "Zooko's Triangle" | 2021-02-17 | 153 Upvotes 54 Comments
- "Zooko's Triangle" | 2010-08-22 | 23 Upvotes 7 Comments
π Socialist millionaire protocol
In cryptography, the socialist millionaire problem is one in which two millionaires want to determine if their wealth is equal without disclosing any information about their riches to each other. It is a variant of the Millionaire's Problem whereby two millionaires wish to compare their riches to determine who has the most wealth without disclosing any information about their riches to each other.
It is often used as a cryptographic protocol that allows two parties to verify the identity of the remote party through the use of a shared secret, avoiding a man-in-the-middle attack without the inconvenience of manually comparing public key fingerprints through an outside channel. In effect, a relatively weak password/passphrase in natural language can be used.
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- "Socialist Millionaire Problem" | 2020-03-14 | 75 Upvotes 31 Comments
- "Socialist millionaire protocol" | 2015-11-07 | 170 Upvotes 63 Comments
π Shamir's Secret Sharing
Shamir's Secret Sharing is an algorithm in cryptography created by Adi Shamir. It is a form of secret sharing, where a secret is divided into parts, giving each participant its own unique part.
To reconstruct the original secret, a minimum number of parts is required. In the threshold scheme this number is less than the total number of parts. Otherwise all participants are needed to reconstruct the original secret.
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- "Shamir's Secret Sharing" | 2023-10-27 | 12 Upvotes 3 Comments
- "Shamir's Secret Sharing" | 2018-08-18 | 177 Upvotes 45 Comments
- "Shamir's Secret Sharing" | 2016-05-16 | 66 Upvotes 16 Comments
π The Clipper Chip
The Clipper chip was a chipset that was developed and promoted by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) as an encryption device that secured βvoice and data messages" with a built-in backdoor. It was intended to be adopted by telecommunications companies for voice transmission. It can encipher and decipher messages. It was part of a Clinton Administration program to βallow Federal, State, and local law enforcement officials the ability to decode intercepted voice and data transmissions." βEach clipper chip ha[d] a unique serial number and a secret βunit key,β programmed into the chip when manufactured." This way, each device was meant to be different from the next.
It was announced in 1993 and by 1996 was entirely defunct.
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- "The Clipper Chip" | 2016-03-16 | 244 Upvotes 39 Comments
π PGP released its source code as a book to get around US export law
Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is an encryption program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication. PGP is used for signing, encrypting, and decrypting texts, e-mails, files, directories, and whole disk partitions and to increase the security of e-mail communications. Phil Zimmermann developed PGP in 1991.
PGP and similar software follow the OpenPGP, an open standard of PGP encryption software, standard (RFC 4880) for encrypting and decrypting data.
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- "PGP released its source code as a book to get around US export law" | 2014-06-12 | 211 Upvotes 47 Comments
π Utah Data Center
The Utah Data Center (UDC), also known as the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center, is a data storage facility for the United States Intelligence Community that is designed to store data estimated to be on the order of exabytes or larger. Its purpose is to support the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI), though its precise mission is classified. The National Security Agency (NSA) leads operations at the facility as the executive agent for the Director of National Intelligence. It is located at Camp Williams near Bluffdale, Utah, between Utah Lake and Great Salt Lake and was completed in May 2019 at a cost of $1.5 billion.
The Utah Data Center, code-named Bumblehive, is the first Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cyber-security Initiative (IC CNCI) data center designed to support the US intelligence community. The "massive data repository" is designed to cope with the large increase in digital data that has accompanied the rise of the global internet.
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- "Utah Data Center" | 2020-05-29 | 40 Upvotes 19 Comments
- "Utah Data Center" | 2013-06-07 | 161 Upvotes 33 Comments
π Homomorphic encryption
Homomorphic encryption is a form of encryption that allows computation on ciphertexts, generating an encrypted result which, when decrypted, matches the result of the operations as if they had been performed on the plaintext.
Homomorphic encryption can be used for privacy-preserving outsourced storage and computation. This allows data to be encrypted and out-sourced to commercial cloud environments for processing, all while encrypted. In highly regulated industries, such as health care, homomorphic encryption can be used to enable new services by removing privacy barriers inhibiting data sharing. For example, predictive analytics in health care can be hard to apply due to medical data privacy concerns, but if the predictive analytics service provider can operate on encrypted data instead, these privacy concerns are diminished.
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- "Homomorphic encryption" | 2019-08-02 | 106 Upvotes 83 Comments