Avsnitt
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Anna is a Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. Her research spans many areas of advanced cryptography including with digital signatures, group signatures, blind signatures, e-cash and anonymous digital credentials. She was originally from Ukraine, and undertook her masters degree at MIT in 1999, and then went onto a PhD in 2002 in the areas of Signature Schemes and Applications to Cryptographic Protocol Design. She joined Brown University in 2002, and was made a full professor in 2013. She is a member of the board of directors at the IACR, along with serving on Scientific Advisory Board for the Board of Directors of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). In 2024, she was awarded the Levchin Prize for a contribution entitled "For the Development of Anonymous Credentials".
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The fallback for law enforcement agencies has always been the place where files are stored, and all the best encryption within end-to-end communications will not stop unencrypted files at rest from being examined. But when the user encrypts data into the Cloud and where they hold their own keys, that’s when the nightmare begins for them.
The rise of cybersecurity on the InternetLet’s pinpoint the start of cybersecurity on the Internet to the 1970s. This saw the rise of the Lucifer cipher and saw banks properly protect their communications. This led to the 56-bit DES encryption method, and which led many to suspect that the size of the key had been crippled due to the demands of law enforcement agencies. But, there was an even greater threat to these agencies evolving: public key encryption.
The rise of public key encryption started in the mid-1970s when Whitfield Diffie and Marty Hellman first defined a method that allowed us to secure our communications using a key exchange method — the Diffie-Hellman key exchange method. And then, almost a year later, Rivest, Shamir and Adleman presented a way to digitally sign a hash of data with the RSA signature method, and where a server could sign a hash of data with its private key and for this to be verified with an associated public key. For almost the first time, we could digitally verify that we were connecting to a valid system. But, the RSA method could not only sign data, it could also encrypt things with a public key, and where the private key could now be used to decrypt the data. It was a nightmare come true for law enforcement agencies.
What was magical about these methods was that you could encrypt data with keys that could be created for every single session — and generated and stored on user devices. User devices could even pick the keys that they wanted and their sizes and security levels. The days of security being crippled were fading fast. While the first versions of SSL were crippled by the demands for limits on this security, eventually, SSL evolved into something that could not be controlled. But, still files could still be viewed on user devices, so it was not a major problem for investigators.
Then, in 2001, the AES method was standardized by NIST, along with the newly defined SHA-256 hashing method, and we basically had all the security methods in place. But all of this did not please law enforcement agencies. For them, the rise of cryptography removed the opportunities that they had had in the past and where they could mass harvest information from phone calls or from the postal service. For the first time in history, citizens were free from spying from both those who protect nations and those who attack citizens. The Wild West years of the early Internet — and where little could be trusted — have subsided, and now we have systems which take encryption from one service on a device to another service on another device — end-to-end encryption.
End-to-end encryptionFor some, end-to-end encryption was the final nail in the coffin for those who wish to monitor the tracks of citizens. This is data in motion, and where law enforcement agencies could still peak at data at rest and where the data is actually stored. Once data in motion and data at rest were encrypted, the door was effectively closed for peaking at data.
And, so, companies such as Apple advanced new methods which protected data at rest, and where all of a citizen's data could be encrypted onto the Cloud without Apple having the encryption key to view any part of it. For this, they created the Advanced Data Protection service:
This service protects things like citizens' photos, iCloud Drive, and wallet passes. For almost the first time, we had almost perfect security — and where five decades of advancement were finally coming together. We now have end-to-end encryption in apps such as What’s App and Signal, and Apple provides secure data storage.
But, some governments around the world saw the rise of privacy as a threat to their security agencies, and where the usage of encryption with file storage and over-the-air would mean that they could not monitor their citizens for threats against society. It is — and always will be — a lose-lose store on both sides. And, so, many governments have been calling for a back door in cryptography so that a “good guy” could get access to the citizen data and communication, but not a “bad guy”. Unfortunately, that’s not the way that encryption works, and where backdoors are a bad thing and difficult to hide.
So, the UK government has put pressure on Apple to provide them with a backdoor into their secure systems. For this, Apple would have to either provide them with a magic key to open up encrypted communications and file store, or dump their Advanced Data Protection system, and leave files unencrypted for investigation.
Apple stepping backIt would have been a difficult choice for Apple, but they have decided to drop their Advanced Data Protection system for UK users, and not go with the nightmare of a backdoor in their systems. Imagine if a terrorist had stored their files in iCloud, and law enforcement agencies had requested these files. Well, Apple would have to hold their hands up and say that they didn’t have the encryption files to access them, as the encryption keys were held by the user.
I trust Apple and believe they have some of the best security around. When was the last time you heard of someone getting some malware on an Apple system? They support a proper secure enclave and are advancing a privacy-aware cloud infrastructure for machine learning. They have also brought forward homomorphic encryption applications. Of all the big tech companies, Apple leads the way in terms of supporting the privacy and the security of users.
ConclusionsI feel sorry for Apple, as they have been painted into a corner. From a cybersecurity point-of-view, it is disappointing that Apple has been forced to step back on the Advanced Data Protection tool, as it was a great advancement in overcoming large-scale data breaches. And, like it or not, there is no magic wand that stops a bad actor from using something that a good actor has access to. Basically, if you leave your front door key under the mat, you have no guarantee that someone else will find the key and use it.
We have advanced cybersecurity for the past few decades and now use end-to-end encryption in a way we should have done from the start of the Internet. Of course, there are no winners in this, and society must find ways to protect itself from bad people, but opening up the whole of iCloud seems like a disaster waiting to happen.
The door is open for other more agile companies to support enhanced security and privacy, as the large tech companies seem to be applying the brake on some of their security advancements.
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YouTube: https://youtu.be/hcdk3u2R5Mo
Yesterday, I gave two short presentations on PQC (Post Quantum Cryptography), and next week, I’m in London to give a more focused talk on the subject. And so, it’s great to see that Samsung is driving forward the adoption of PQC methods in their new S25 smartphone.
There are two companies that have a core focus on creating trusted hardware for consumers: Apple and Samsung. Apple has always had a core focus on making sure they use the best cryptography to not only secure their devices but also to make them privacy-aware. Samsung, too, has strived for improved security but, at times, has made a few slip-ups along the way, but always patched around them. Now, Samsung Electronics has integrated PQC into their Galaxy S25 series of devices.
The need for this is that NIST will deprecate all our existing public key methods in 2030, including: RSA for public key encryption; RSA, ECDSA and EdDSA for signatures; and ECDH for key exchange. NIST will then remove them in 2035 from the NIST FIPS 140 standard. Given that a smartphone will have a life of at least five years, it makes sense to build the hardware to support the migration. Along with this, we see the rise of “harvest now, decrypt later” threats, where network traffic could be captured now and then decrypted sometime in the future.
The main integration at the current time involved ML-KEM (FIPS 203, aka Kyber) and ML-DSA (FIPS 204, aka Dilithium). With ML-KEM we replace key exchange and public key encryption methods, while ML-DSA provides us with digital signing:
These methods will be the Samsung Knox Matrix for enhanced data protection — this includes end-to-encryption for back-ups and the recovery of data from the Samsung Cloud. Overall, Samsung devices, like Apple hardware, have a secure enclave to store private and secret keys, and where not even Samsung can get access to them.
The usage of PQC will mean that Samsung devices will be able to communicate with other devices in the future and which are using PQC methods. This ensures not only current compatibility but also future compatibility. An important advancement of the industry is that Samsung will support PQC methods for their backup system to their Cloud.
ConclusionsOf course, the integration will not force applications and services to use PQC, and in most cases, it will still use our traditional methods, as devices that it connects to must support PQC. Thus, we will see a migration towards PQC, rather than a hard switch-over. In cryptography, this is often the case, as we can typically negotiate the cryptography methods that are used in the secure transmission or storage of data. Once all the required services and applications support PQC, our existing public key methods will likely be switched off.
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Aysegul Sensoy has over 20 years of management experience with blockchain, emerging technologies, fintech, business development, marketing and sales. She is currently the chair of the Istanbul Blockchain Women Association and CIS Regional Manager of Fuze Finance. She received her bachelor's degree in economics from Istanbul University and her master's degree in marketing communications management from Galatasaray University, as well as getting an executive MBA.
She entered the tech sector after working in national and multinational companies as a marketing director, country manager, and many other roles. Aysegul is CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) regional manager of Fuze Finance, an Abu Dhabi-based licensed fintech providing embedded digital asset capabilities for financial institutions. She was the Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at XYZ Teknoloji, a blockchain-focused FinTech company based in Istanbul. Aysegul is a chairwoman and founding member of Istanbul Blockchain Woman, a non-profit association dedicated to empowering women in the blockchain ecosystem. The community's purpose is to organise social responsibility projects that will provide women with positive discrimination in terms of technology and blockchain. She is also a co-founder of the SOS Chain initiative, partners with needsmap.coop, which is a blockchain infrastructure fund for disasters and rapid humanitarian crises worldwide.
Aysegul is leading the Euthenia community in Turkey, which is a Madrid-based organization aiming to increase C-level gender equity both in the Mediterranean and the MENA countries. She is also the co-founder of FairShare which aims to serve a transparent dApp, allows Muslim faithful to make their Zakat contributions crypto assets.
More details on IBW: https://istanbulblockchainwomen.org/homepage/
If you are interested in the Trust4Futures Deep Skills Development course, you can find out more information here:
https://trust4futures.com
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Amit is a professor of computer science at UCLA and is the director of the Center for Encrypted Functionalities. Amit has been cited in his research work over 63,000 times and has an h-index of 91. In 2000, he graduated with a PhD from MIT and then moved to Princeton. In 2004, he then moved to UCLA.
Over the years, he has made so many great advancements, including being the co-inventor of many areas of cryptography, including indistinguishability obfuscation schemes, functional encryption, attribute-based encryption, Zero-Knowledge Proofs and Multiparty Computation.
In 2018, he was elected as an ACM Fellow for his work for the "contributions to cryptography and to the development of indistinguishability obfuscation", and elected as a Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research for "fundamental contributions, including to secure computation, zero knowledge, and functional encryption, and for service to the IACR". In 2023, Amit received the Test of Time Award from the International Association for Cryptologic Research for his 2008 paper "Efficient Non-interactive Proof Systems for Bilinear Groups". Then, in 2022, he received the Michael and Sheila Held Prize from the National Academy of Sciences and which credits outstanding, innovative, creative, and influential research in the areas of combinatorial and discrete optimisation. And, in teaching, in 2016, he won the UCLA Samueli’s Lockheed Martin Excellence in Teaching Award.
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Bart is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering department at KU Leuven in Belgium. He co-invented the Miyaguchi (Meya-Goochy)–Preneel scheme and which converts a block cipher into a hash function. Bart is also one of the co-inventors of the RIPEMD-160 hashing method, and which is used in Bitcoin addresses. He also co-designed the stream ciphers MUGI and Trivium, the MAC Algorithms Chaskey and MDxMAC and the authenticated encryption algorithm AEGIS that is used to encryption of data at rest ion Google cloud. Bart was the President of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) from 2008 to 2013 and one of his hobbies is conducting the University of Leuven Bigband and playing saxophone in a Dixieland band.Bart consults for industry and government on cybersecurity and privacy.
He founded the mobile authentication startup nextAuth and holds roles in Approach Belgium, Tioga Capital Partners, and Nym Technologies. During the pandemic he co-designed the DP-3T scheme for privacy-friendly contact tracing and managed the Belgian Coronalert app. Actively engaged in cybersecurity policy, he contributes to ENISA as an Advisory Group member for the EU.
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Ivan Damgard is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Aarhus University in Denmark. He is the co-inventor of the Merkle-Damgard construction, and which was used in MD5, SHA-1 and SHA-2. In 2020, he received the Test of Time Award for a paper entitled "A Generalisation, a Simplification and Some Applications of Paillier's Probabilistic Public-Key System", and in 2021 he received an ACM award for the Test of Time for a paper entitled "Multiparty unconditionally secure protocols. In 2010, he was elected as a Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research. Ivan has also co-founded two cryptography companies: Cryptomathic and Partisia.
Web: here.
Video: here.
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Chris is a Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at the University of Michigan. He completed his PhD in 2006 at the MIT Computer Science and AI Laboratory under the mentorship of Silvio Micali. He received a Test of Time award at Crypto 2008 for a paper entitled "A Framework for Efficient and Composable Oblivious Transfer" and also a TCC Test of Time award for his paper on “Efficient Collision-Resistant Hashing from Worst-Case Assumptions on Cyclic Lattices,” in 2006. In 2024, Chris was elected as a Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research and is seen as one of the world leaders in lattice-based methods.
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Clifford Cocks is a British mathematician and cryptographer. While working at GCHQ, he invented public key encryption, and which predates the work of the RSA and Diffie-Hellman methods. He studied mathematics as an undergraduate at Kings College, Cambridge, and then joined the Communications-Electronics Security Group (CESG) at GCHQ in 1973. After his discovery of a usable public key encryption method, he went on to create one of the first Identity-Based Encryption methods and which is based on quadratic residues rather than bilinear pairings.
In 2008, he was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB). Then, in 2010, he and James Ellis and Malcolm Williamson were honoured by the IEEE for their part in the development of public key encryption. In 2015, he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, and, in the same year, he received an honorary PhD from the University of Birmingham. Then, in 2021, Clifford was inducted into the Cryptologic Hall of Honour.
Read more: https://medium.com/asecuritysite-when-bob-met-alice/so-who-invented-public-key-encryption-213ceef7759
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Bill Buchanan Chats With Debbie Reynolds (The Data Diva). Debbie's podcast is here:
https://www.debbiereynoldsconsulting.com/podcast
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Vadim Lyubashevsky is a cryptographer at IBM Research Europe in Zurich. He received his PhD from the University of California, San Diego in 2008. His core research focus is around lattice-based methods, and especially in areas of practical lattice encryption, digital signatures and privacy-preserving primitives. Along with Chris Peiker and Oded Regev (the inventor of LWE), he published a classic paper entitled "On ideal lattices and learning with errors over rings", which has been used as a foundation for lattice methods within post-quantum cryptography. Vadim has worked in many areas of cryptography, including Zero Knowledge Proofs, Blind Signatures and Multiparty Computation.
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=4H1u8swAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
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Matthew is a cryptographer and academic at Johns Hopkins University and has designed and analyzed cryptographic systems used in wireless networks, payment systems and digital content protection platforms. A key focus of his work is in the promotion of user privacy. He has an extensive following on X/Twitter (140K followers) and his blog covers important areas of cryptography:
https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/author/matthewdgreen/
His research has been cited over 15,000 times and includes work on Zerocash, Zerocoin and Identity Based Encryption (IBE), and more recently on privacy-aware signatures:
https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=X0XWAGkAAAAJ
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Alfred Menezes is a Professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. In 2001, he won the Hall Medal from the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications. Alfred is the lead author of the Handbook of Applied Cryptography, and which has been cited over 25,000 times. He has published many high impact papers, especially in areas of public key encryption and elliptic curve cryptography, and was the co-inventor of the ECDSA signature method.
His website for online courses is https://cryptography101.ca. The "Cryptography101: Building Blocks" and "Cryptography 101: Deployments" courses are lectures from the undergraduate "Applied Cryptography" that he has taught at Waterloo since 2000. The former includes a five-lecture introduction to elliptic curve cryptography. He also has a course on "Kyber and Dilithium", and soon an intro to "Lattice-based cryptography".
Video recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5GWFAewQ80
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This seminar series runs for students on the Network Security and Cryptography module, but invites guests to participate. Bruce has created a wide range of cryptographic methods including Skein (hash function), Helix (stream cipher), Fortuna (random number generator), and Blowfish/Twofish/Threefish (block ciphers).
Bruce has published 14 books, including best-sellers such as Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World. He has also published hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers. Currently, Bruce is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
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Brent Waters is a Professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the Director of the Cryptography Lab at NTT Research. He graduated from the UCL in 2000, then completed a PhD at Princeton University in 2004. After this, he moved on to Stanford as a postdoc.
Overall, Brent was the first to propose Attribute-based Encryption (ABE) and also the first to outline functional encryption. He was also awarded the Sloan Research Fellowship in 2010, and, in 2015, he was awarded the Grace Murray Hopper Award for his work on ABE and functional encryption.
Brent’s research has been cited over 68,700 times for his research work, and has provided a core foundation for cybersecurity to move towards methods that provide fine-grained data access.
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Well, as if cybersecurity doesn’t have enough acronyms. There’s RIP, OSPF, TCP, IP, SSH, AES, and so many others. Now, there are three really important ones to remember: ML-KEM (Module Lattice-Based Key Encapsulation Mechanism), ML-DSA (Module Lattice-Based Signature Standard) and SLH-DSA (Stateless Hash-based Digital Signature Standard). ML-KEM is defined in the FIPS 203 standard, ML-DSA as FIPS 204, and for SLH-DSA, we have FIPS 205.
https://medium.com/@billatnapier/get-used-to-three-boring-acronyms-ml-kem-ml-dsa-and-slh-dsa-0156b6ab82c5
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The cybersecurity world is changing, and where the signature methods of RSA, ECDSA and EdDSA are likely to be replaced by FIPS 204 (aka ML-DSA Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Standard— Dilithium) and FIPS 205 (aka SLH-DSA (Stateless Hash-based Digital Signature Standard — SPHINCS+)
https://medium.com/@billatnapier/so-what-is-a-prehash-and-what-has-it-to-do-with-post-quantum-signatures-bf7812cfa203
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In cybersecurity, there are so many acronyms, and to be an expert, you really need to dig underneath the methods and understand how they work. One weak area of the industry is in the usage of MACs (Message Authentication Codes).
With the public-key signing, we use a public key and a private key, where the private key will digitally sign a hash of the message, and where the public key is verified the signature. With a MAC, we use a shared symmetric key, and where Bob and Alice will share the same secret key (Figure 1).
https://medium.com/@billatnapier/cmac-or-hmac-which-is-better-8e1861f744d0
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Article: https://medium.com/asecuritysite-when-bob-met-alice/the-brainpool-curves-f2f865b88191
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