Holy Bits, Coderperson!

via Mike Orcutt, reporting for the MIT Technology Review brings today's Must Read post to our attention on this beautiful Monday morning. Apparently, the highly touted immutability and repudiation-resistant Blockchain, is not completely immune to cleverly mounted attack methodologies.

Witness, if you will, the Twilight Zone of Blockhain, in which, the highly-touted cryptological database construct known as the Blockchain falls prey to not only it's proponents own hubris, but to the reckoning of all things crypto.

For, as we now know, if a cryptosystem can be attacked, the attack will be successful due to cryptocurrency susceptibility to 51% attacks, and dreaded smart-contract bugs. Enjoy the new crypto-flavor of Now! Feels a bit like schadenfreude right-about-now... H/T

Quantum Computation Breaks Crypto? Unlikely... →

Mark H. Kim, a contributing writer at Quanta Magazine illuminates a recent paper published at the IACR, and contributed by Daniel J. Bernstein, Nadia Heninger, Paul Lou and Luke Valenta, postulate in their paper 'Post-quantum RSA' that in fact, the RSA algorithm might very well not be broken by the use of a quantum computational devices when aprpriately manipulated.

'The authors of the paper estimate that attacking a terabyte-size key using Shor’s algorithm would require around 2100 operations on a quantum computer, an enormous number comparable to the total number of bacterial cells on Earth.' - via Mark H. Kim, writing at Quanta Magazine, and from his article 'Why Quantum Computers Might Not Break Cryptography

The paper's content abstract:

'Abstract. This paper proposes RSA parameters for which (1) key gen- eration, encryption, decryption, signing, and verification are feasible on today’s computers while (2) all known attacks are infeasible, even as- suming highly scalable quantum computers. As part of the performance analysis, this paper introduces a new algorithm to generate a batch of primes. As part of the attack analysis, this paper introduces a new quan- tum factorization algorithm that is often much faster than Shor’s algo- rithm and much faster than pre-quantum factorization algorithms. Initial pqRSA implementation results are provided.' Excerpt from Post-quantum RSA published via the IACR, and authored by Daniel J. Bernstein, Nadia Heninger, Paul Lou and Luke Valenta.

Glyph Perturbation, The Science of Font Steganography →

via Chang Xiao, Cheng Zhang, Changxi Zheng, all from Columbia University, and presented at the ACM Transaction on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2018), comes this phenomenal steganographic research; in which, a new methodology to hide information within documents utilizing manipulation of the fonts therein is laid bare, i.e., a new form of steganographic manipulation! Today's Must Read & watch the video below the Abstract.

"Abstract: We introduce FontCode, an information embedding technique for text documents. Provided a text document with specific fonts, our method embeds user-specified information in the text by perturbing the glyphs of text characters while preserving the text content. We devise an algorithm to choose unobtrusive yet machine-recognizable glyph perturbations, leveraging a recently developed generative model that alters the glyphs of each character continuously on a font manifold. We then introduce an algorithm that embeds a user-provided message in the text document and produces an encoded document whose appearance is minimally perturbed from the original document. We also present a glyph recognition method that recovers the embedded information from an encoded document stored as a vector graphic or pixel image, or even on a printed paper. In addition, we introduce a new error-correction coding scheme that rectifies a certain number of recognition errors. Lastly, we demonstrate that our technique enables a wide array of applications, using it as a text document metadata holder, an unobtrusive optical barcode, a cryptographic message embedding scheme, and a text document signature." - via Chang Xiao, Cheng Zhang, Changxi Zheng, all from Columbia University.

International Association for Cryptologic Research's CHES 2018 Call for Tutorials / Posters / Papers

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The International Association for Cryptologic Research has issued a Call for Papers, Posters and Tutorials to enrich your Association's upcoming Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES) 2018 event, slated for Amsterdam, The Netherlands from 2018/09/09 - 2018/09/12 inclusive. Enjoy!