Before I go anywhere with this post, let me make three things very clear: I do not work for CloudFlare. I work for a small local ISP in Utah. I have been using Tor probably almost as long as many of you have been alive. I first blogged about Tor in 2006. I had discovered […]
Peter Gutmann on the "[Cryptography]" mailing list wrote some thoughts about the impending crypto monoculture of all-things-Bernstein that seems to be currently sweeping the crypto world. In his post, he mentions the following (emphasis mine): The remaining mode is OCB, which I'd consider the best AEAD mode out there (it shares CBC's graceful-degradation property in […]
I'm hardly the first one to notice this, but I was having a discussion in ##crypto on Freenode about the Linux kernel CSPRNG performance. It was mentioned that the kernelspace CSPRNG was "horrendously slow". Personally, I found the performance sufficient for me needs, but I decided to entertain his definition. I'm glad I did; I […]
One thing that bothers me about OpenSSL is the lack of commandline support for AEAD ciphers, specifically AES in CCM and GCM block modes. Why does this matter? Suppose you want to save an encrypted file to disk, without GnuPG, because you don't want to get into key management. Further, suppose you want to send […]
I recently submitted a bug to the Vim project about its Blowfish encryption not using authentication. Bram Moolenaar, the lead developer of Vim, responded about using checksums and digital signatures. I hope he doesn't mind me using him as an example here, but I want to quote the relevant bits (emphasis mine): The encryption is […]
Recently, the Bitcoin mining rate surpassed 1 exahash per second, or 1 quintillion SHA-256 hashes per second. If we do some quick math, we can determine the following: If SHA-1 collisions can be found in 2^65.3 hashes, that's one SHA-1 collision found every 45 seconds. Every combination of bits can be flipped in an 84-bit […]
Background I've been a long-time KeepassX user, and to be honest, I don't see that changing any time soon. I currently have my password database on an SSH-accessible server, of which I use kpcli as the main client for accessing the db. I use Keepass2Android with SFTP on my phone to get read-only access to […]
I hang out in ##crypto in Freenode, and every now and then, someone will ask about the security of multiple encryption, usually with the context that AES could be broken in the near future. When talking about multiple encryption, they are usually referring to cascade encryption which has the form of: CT = Alg_B(Alg_A(M, key_A), […]
This post is inspired by a discussion in irc://irc.freenode.net/#gnupg about Keybase and a blog post by Filippo Valsorda. I was curious just exactly how my private key is encrypted. Turns out, gpg(1) can tell you directly: $ gpg --output /tmp/secret-key.gpg --export-secret-keys 0x22EEE0488086060F $ gpg --list-packets /tmp/secret-key.gpg :secret key packet: version 4, algo 17, created 1095486266, […]
I have been a long proponent of OpenPGP keys for a way to communicate securely. I have used my personal key for signing emails since ~ 2005. I have used my key at dozens and dozens of keysigning parties. I have used my key to store account passwords and credentials with vim(1), Python, and so […]
You'll always see comments on web forums, social sites, blog posts, and emails about "XKCD passwords". This is of course referring to the XKCD comic by Randall Munroe describing what he thinks is the best password generator: What no one has bothered asking, is if this actually works. Lorrie Faith Cranor, director of the Carnegie […]
In my last post in this short series, I want to discuss how to setup a transparent proxy on your Android phone using the builtin VPN for L2TP. As usual, the same precautions apply here. Don't be stupid with your data, just because you can hide it from your ISP. In general, I'm skeptical of […]
In my last post, I explained how to setup a Global SSH proxy on Android with ConnectBot and ProxyDroid. In this article, I'll do the same thing, but with Orbot. Also, as with the last article, the same precautions apply here. If you're on an untrusted or unknown network, using an encrypted proxy can be […]
I'm one that takes precautions with my data when on unfamiliar or untrusted networks. While for the most part, I trust TLS to handle my data securely, I find that it doesn't take much effort to setup a transparent proxy on my Android handset, to route all packets through an encrypted proxy. In this case, […]
Recently, the Password Hashing Competition announced its winner, namely Argon2, as the future of password hashing. It's long since been agreed that using generic-purpose cryptographic hashing algorithms for passwords is not a best practice. This is due to their speed. Cryptographic hashing algorithms are designed to be lighting fast, while also maintaining large margins of […]