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Most people are barely thinking about basic cybersecurity, let alone post-quantum cryptography. But the impact of a post-quantum world is coming for them regardless of whether or not it's keeping them up tonight.  Today, many rely on encryption in their daily lives to protect their fundamental digital privacy and security, whether for messaging friends and family, storing files and photos, or simply browsing the web. The question experts have been asking for a long time, with their eye on the advances in quantum computing, is, "How long before these defenses fail?"  The ticking clock of quantum computing One set of researchers is already sounding the alarms,  claiming  that they've found a way to break 2048-bit RSA encryption with a quantum computer. While the claims may be premature, they hint toward a scary future that is perhaps closer than we once thought. Breaking RSA encryption would represent a massive privacy and security vulnerability for virtually every...

And the Winners of this year's Turing Award are: Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman . The former chief security officer at Sun Microsystems Whitfield Diffie and the professor at Stanford University Martin E. Hellman won the 2015 ACM Turing Award, which is frequently described as the "Nobel Prize of Computing" . Turing Award named after  Alan M. Turing , the British mathematician and computer scientist who was a key contributor to the Allied cryptanalysis of the German Enigma cipher and the German "Tunny" encoding machine in World War II. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) announced the Turing Award the same day when FBI Director  James Comey  appeared before a congressional committee to discuss how  encryption has become Threat  to law enforcement. The ACM  announced the award on Tuesday, which includes the top prize of $1 Million that has been awarded to two men who invented the "public-key cryptography" – a technique that ...

Introduction: Steal It Today, Break It in a Decade Digital evolution is unstoppable, and though the pace may vary, things tend to fall into place sooner rather than later. That, of course, applies to adversaries as well. The rise of ransomware and cyber extortion generated funding for a complex and highly professional criminal ecosystem. The era of the cloud brought general availability of almost infinite amounts of storage. So there is literally nothing that stops criminals from stealing and trafficking heaps of data, be it encrypted or not.  Patient adversaries are employing a "Harvest Now, Decrypt Later" (HNDL) strategy. They are quietly accumulating encrypted data with the intention of decrypting it later using quantum computers. Any data requiring long-term security, such as trade secrets or classified designs, is vulnerable because its lifespan will inevitably outlive its current encryption. Therefore, it is crucial that organizations begin planning their PQC migrati...

Over the past several months, it has become clear that the Internet and our Privacy have been fundamentally compromised. A Private search engine DuckDuckGo claims that when you click on one of their search results, they do not send personally identifiable information along with your request to the third party. Like Google dorks (advance search patterns), there are thousands of similar, but technically more useful search hacks are also available in DuckDuckGo called DuckDuckGoodies . Today I am going to share about Handy " Cryptography " using DuckDuckGo search engine . Whether you are a Hacker, Cracker or a Researcher, you need to face a number of hash strings in your day to day life. Hashing is a one way encryption of a plain text or a file, generally used to secure passwords or to check the integrity of the file. There is a certain set of hashing algorithms, e.g.md5, sha1, sha-512 etc. A hash function generates the exact output if executed n numbe...

Super Cryptography : The Next Generation Encryption The next generation of encryption technologies meets this need by using Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) to replace RSA and DH, and using Galois/Counter Mode (GCM) of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) block cipher for high-speed authenticated encryption. Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is an approach to public-key cryptography based on the algebraic structure of elliptic curves over finite fields. The use of elliptic curves in cryptography was suggested independently by Neal Koblitz and Victor S. Miller in 1985. According to Cisco ," New algorithms for encryption, authentication, digital signatures, and key exchange are needed to meet escalating security and performance requirements ". A 244-bit ECC key has the equivalent strength of a 2048-bit RSA key for security; a 384-bit ECC key matches a 7680-bit RSA key. Greater strength for any given key length enables the use of shorter keys, resulting in significantly l...

Most organizations assume encrypted data is safe. But many attackers are already preparing for a future where today’s encryption can be broken. Instead of trying to decrypt information now, they are collecting encrypted data and storing it so it can be decrypted later using quantum computers. This tactic—known as “harvest now, decrypt later” —means sensitive data transmitted today could become readable years from now once quantum capabilities mature. Security leaders who want to understand this risk and how to prepare can explore it in detail in the upcoming webinar on Post-Quantum Cryptography best practices , where experts will explain practical ways organizations can begin protecting data before quantum decryption becomes possible. Why Post-Quantum Cryptography Matters Quantum computing is advancing quickly, and most modern encryption algorithms, such as RSA and ECC, will not remain secure forever. For organizations that must keep data confidential for many years—financial r...

Cryptographer Professor Jean-Jacques Quisquater has become the part of a targeted attack by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and its British counterpart GCHQ, first reported on Saturday morning by De Standaard . A few months back in September 2013 it was revealed that, Belgacom , the largest telecommunications company in Belgium was hacked and number of employees on Belgacom’s network, including their servers were compromised. Later in November 2013 , it was revealed that the NSA and GCHQ were behind the infiltration of the company’s computers, according to the document provided by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden . The document detailed that the British intelligence agency GCHQ created fake ‘ LinkedIn ’ and ‘ Slashdot ’ pages to spy on computers of Belgacom network engineers. They used a method called “ quantum insert ”, to redirect employees to fake websites that contained malware using Man in the middle attack to a spoofed server ( codenamed "...

A Senior cryptography expert has claimed multiple issues with PGP email encryption - an open source end-to-end encryption  to secure email. Before continuing, I would like to clarify that covering this topic doesn't mean you should stop using PGP encryption , instead we are bringing to you what Security researcher has argued about its fundamental implications.  PGP or Pretty Good Privacy , a program written in 1991, uses symmetric public key cryptography and hashing that allow both Privacy and Security , as well as Authenticity . Privacy and Security ensure users to exchange messages securely and Authenticity proves the origin of those messages. But PGP is a complicated multi-step process, which requires users to keep track of the public keys of other users in order to communicate. Despite clumsiness of the PGP implementation, the popular Internet giants such as Google and Yahoo! have looked forward to integrate it into their popular email services. A respected research p...

Quantum Computers – Boon or Bane? Quantum computers can perform operations much more quickly and efficiently even with the use of less energy than conventional computers, but that's bad news for encryption — a process which scrambles data according to a massively complex mathematical code. In theory, quantum computers can break almost all the existing encryption algorithms used on the Internet today due to their immense computing power. Quantum computers are not just in theories; they're becoming a reality. With countries like China that holds the top two position in the world's most powerful supercomputers (Sunway TaihuLight and Tianhe-2), followed by the United States' Titan, the day is not far when Quantum computers will work on an industrial scale. Although it's hard to move quantum computing to an industrial scale, it has become a matter of concern for the United States' National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) over the fact that...

Apple has announced a new post-quantum cryptographic protocol called  PQ3  that it said will be integrated into iMessage to secure the messaging platform against future attacks arising from the threat of a practical quantum computer. "With compromise-resilient encryption and extensive defenses against even highly sophisticated quantum attacks, PQ3 is the first messaging protocol to reach what we call Level 3 security — providing protocol protections that surpass those in all other widely deployed messaging apps," Apple  said . The iPhone maker described the protocol as "groundbreaking," "state-of-the-art," and as having the "strongest security properties" of any cryptographic convention deployed at scale. PQ3 is the latest security guardrail erected by Apple in iMessage after it switched from  RSA  to Elliptic Curve cryptography ( ECC ), and by protecting encryption keys on devices with the Secure Enclave in 2019. While the current algorith...

Are you Using HTTPS on your Website to securely encrypt traffic? Well, we'll see you in the court. At least, that's what CryptoPeak is saying to all big brands that utilize HTTPS on their web servers. BIG Brands Sued for Using HTTPS: 'Patent Troll' Texas-based company CryptoPeak Solutions LLC has filed 66 lawsuits against many big businesses in the US, claiming they have illegally used its patented encryption method – Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) – on their HTTPS websites. Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is a key exchange algorithm that is most widely used on websites secured with Transport Layer Security (TLS) to determine what symmetric keys are used during a session. Encryption is on the rise after Edward Snowden made the world aware of government’s global surveillance programs. Today, many big tech and online services are using encryption to: Protect the data transmitted to/from visitor to domain Lessen the risk of hacking ...

Popular enterprise services provider Zoom has announced the rollout of post-quantum end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for Zoom Meetings, with support for Zoom Phone and Zoom Rooms coming in the future. "As adversarial threats become more sophisticated, so does the need to safeguard user data," the company  said  in a statement. "With the launch of post-quantum E2EE, we are doubling down on security and providing leading-edge features for users to help protect their data." Zoom's post-quantum E2EE uses  Kyber-768 , which aims at security roughly equivalent to AES-192. Kyber was  chosen  by the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in July 2022 as the quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithm for general encryption. However, for post-quantum E2EE to be enabled by default, it  requires  all meeting participants to be on Zoom desktop or mobile app version 6.0.10 or higher. In the e...

In what appears to be the world's first quantum satellite transmission, China has successfully sent an "unbreakable" code over a long distance from an orbiting satellite to the Earth, achieving a milestone in the next generation encryption based on "quantum cryptography." In August last year, China launched the world's first quantum communication satellite into the Earth’s orbit aboard a Long March-2D rocket to test the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics at space. Dubbed Quantum Science Satellite , nicknamed Micius or Mozi (Chinese: 墨子), the satellite was designed to establish a 'Hack-Proof' communications system in this age of global surveillance by transmitting unbreakable encryption keys from space to the ground. Now, it has been reported that using this satellite, the Chinese scientists at the Quantum Experiments at Space Scale (QUESS) project were able to send secret "quantum key distribution" (QKD) data by beaming photons ...

Fujitsu cracks 278-digit crypto in 148 Days using 21 PCs A team of researchers in Japan have successfully broken a 278-digit piece of crypto in less than 200 days. Fujitsu Laboratories Limited , National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) and Kyushu University jointly broke a world cryptography record with the successful cryptanalysis of a 278-digit (923-bit)-long pairing-based cryptography, which is now becoming the next generation cryptography standard. " We were able to overcome this problem by making good use of various new technologies, that is, a technique optimising parameter setting that uses computer algebra, a two dimensional search algorithm extended from the linear search, and by using our efficient programing techniques to calculate a solution of an equation from a huge number of data, as well as the parallel programming technology that maximises computer power ." This doesn't mean that pairing-based cryptography, which is rapid...

After Adobe today releases its first Patch Tuesday updates for 2020, Microsoft has now also published its January security advisories warning billions of users of 49 new vulnerabilities in its various products. What's so special about the latest Patch Tuesday is that one of the updates fixes a serious flaw in the core cryptographic component of widely used Windows 10, Server 2016 and 2019 editions that was discovered and reported to the company by the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States. What's more interesting is that this is the first security flaw in Windows OS that the NSA reported responsibly to Microsoft, unlike the  Eternalblue SMB flaw that the agency kept secret for at least five years and then was leaked to the public by a mysterious group, which caused WannaCry menace in 2017. CVE-2020-0601: Windows CryptoAPI Spoofing Vulnerability According to an advisory released by Microsoft, the flaw, dubbed ' NSACrypt ' and tracked as CVE-20...

British government surveillance agency GCHQ – counterpart of NSA – has fired-up another debate over the Internet by launching Android application to encourage teenagers to tackle emerging cybersecurity threats. The newly launched Android app , dubbed " Cryptoy ", was developed by STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) students on an industrial year placement at GCHQ. The Cryptoy app was highly appreciated and liked by GCHQ at the Cheltenham Science Festival that they made it available to download today. The app is designed mainly to tempt youngsters between the ages of 14 and 16 into trying their hand in cryptography and code-breaking, but can be used by anyone interested in cryptography. According to GCHQ , Cryptoy app will help users to understand basic encryption methods, teach the codes of the past, and create their own encrypted messages. The app allows users to share these encoded messages by using four code-breaking techniques – Shift, Subs...

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has announced that a family of authenticated encryption and hashing algorithms known as Ascon will be standardized for  lightweight cryptography  applications. "The chosen algorithms are designed to protect information created and transmitted by the Internet of Things (IoT), including its myriad tiny sensors and actuators," NIST  said . "They are also designed for other miniature technologies such as implanted medical devices, stress detectors inside roads and bridges, and keyless entry fobs for vehicles." Put differently, the idea is to adopt security protections via lightweight cryptography in devices that have a "limited amount of electronic resources." That said, NIST still recommends the Advanced Encryption Standard ( AES ) and SHA-256 for general use. Ascon is  credited  to a team of cryptographers from the Graz University of Technology, Infineon Technologies, Lamarr Security Researc...

Google Cloud has announced quantum-safe digital signatures in Google Cloud Key Management Service ( Cloud KMS ) for software-based keys as a way to bulletproof encryption systems against the threat posed by cryptographically-relevant quantum computers. The feature, currently in preview, coexists with the National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) post-quantum cryptography (PQC) standards, the final versions of which were formalized in August 2024. "Our Cloud KMS PQC roadmap includes support for the NIST post-quantum cryptography standards (FIPS 203, FIPS 204, FIPS 205, and future standards), in both software (Cloud KMS) and hardware (Cloud HSM)," the company's cloud division noted . "This can help customers perform quantum-safe key import and key exchange, encryption and decryption operations, and digital signature creation." The tech giant said its underlying software implementations of these standards – FIPS 203 (aka ML-KEM), FIPS 204 ...

CrySyS Duqu Detector Open source Toolkit Released Two weeks ago Researchers at the Laboratory of Cryptography and System Security (CrySyS) in Hungary confirmed the existence of the zero-day vulnerability in the Windows kernel , according to security researchers tracking the Stuxnet-like cyber-surveillance Trojan. The Laboratory of Cryptography and System Security (CrySyS) has released an open-source toolkit that can find traces of Duqu infections on computer networks.The open-source toolkit, from the Laboratory of Cryptography and System Security (CrySyS), contains signature- and heuristics-based methods that can find traces of Duqu infections where components of the malware are already removed from the system. They make a release that " The toolkit contains signature and heuristics based methods and it is able to find traces of infections where components of the malware are already removed from the system.The intention behind the tools is to find different typ...