As you know, I am a cryptography hobbyist. More specifically, I have an interest in pencil and paper ciphers, also referred to as "hand ciphers" or "field ciphers". Since Bruce Schneier released his Solitaire Cipher for Neal Stephenson's book "Cryptonomicon" (known in the book as "Pontifex"), I have had a real desire to learn hand […]
Yesterday, I received my Kidekin TRNG hardware random number generator. I was eager to purchase this, because on the Tindie website, the first 2 people to purchase the RNG would get $50 off, making the device $30 total. I quickly ordered one. Hilariously enough, I received a letter from the supplier that I was their […]
A couple days ago, I put up a post about using the Realtek SDR dongles as a hardware true random number generator. I only tested the randomness of a 512 MB file. I thought this time, I would but a bit more stock into it. In this case, I let it run for a while, […]
An rtl-sdr dongle allows you to receive radio frequency signals to your computer through a software interface. You can listen to Amateur Radio, watch analog television, listen to FM radio broadcasts, and a number of other things. I have a friend to uses it to monitor power usage at his house. However, I have a […]
This morning, my family and I went swimming at the community swimming center. Unfortunately, I couldn't find my key-based lock that I normally take. However, I did find my Master combination lock, but couldn't recall the combination. Fortunately, I knew how to find it. I took this lock with me to lock my personal items […]
In April 2014, Heartbleed shook the Internet. OpenSSL had introduced a feature called "TLS Heartbeats" Heartbeats allow for a client-encrypted session to remain open between the client and the server, without the need to renegotiate a new connection. In theory, the feature is sound. Heartbeats should minimize load on busy servers, and improve responsiveness on […]
As many of you have probably seen, Stribik András wrote a post titled Secure Secure Shell. It's made the wide rounds across the Internet, and has seen a good, positive discussion about OpenSSH security. It's got people thinking about their personal SSH keys, as well as the differences between ECC and RSA, why the /etc/ssh/moduli […]
When using Keybase, occasionally, people will track your identity. This has cryptographic value. Your identity on Keybase is based on what you do online and how long you have done it. As people track you, they cryptographically sign your Keybase identity. This creates a snapshot in time that states you've taken the precautions to verify […]
Recently, I have been playing with my Keybase account, and I thought I would weigh in on my thoughts about it compared to the PGP Web of Trust (WoT). The PGP WoT tries to solve the following two problems directly: You have the correct key of the person to whom you wish to communicate. You […]
On the Internet, mostly in crypto circles, you'll see something like the following in a comment, forum post, on a mailing list, other otherwise: Do not use fast hashes to store passwords on disk. Use bcrypt. In most cases, however, the understanding of why to use bcrypt isn't entirely clear. You'll hear the standard answer […]
In a previous post, about 18 months ago, I blogged about how you can increase the strength of your OpenSSH private keys by using openssl(1) to convert them to PKCS#8 format. However, as of OpenSSH verison 6.5, there is a new private key format for private keys, as well as a new key type. The […]
While writing a shell script the other day, I was redirecting some output to /dev/null, as normal, when something dawned on me. Why don't I redirect my output to /dev/random instead? After all, both Linux random devices are writable by everyone on the system: $ ls -l /dev/*random crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 8 Nov […]
I've been on the Bitmessage network roughly since it was released. Maybe only a month or two later. One thing that has had me intrigued, although I've never really paid attnetion to ut until now, is Bitmessage's proof-of-work puzzle. A proof-of-work puzzle is a puzzle your computer solves to generally gain access to some resource. […]
While hanging out on the "privacy" channel on Bitmessage, someone sent the following: "You have no files saved. For instructions please send a message to BM-2cUqBbiJhTCQsTeocfocNP5WCRcH28saPU with the subject 'help'." This is actually pretty cool. No doubt should you call into question a faceless storage provider, but I thought I would play around with it. […]
What Is A Cryptographic Hashing Algorithm? Cryptographic hashing algorithms are one-way functions that produce a message digest that represents a given input. Because the keyspace is so astromically large, it should be practically infeasible to find a different input that represents the same digest. The input is typically referred to as the message while the […]