brainwagon

Stumbling back through articles in Slashdot, I found a pretty nifty article on one of my favorite subjects: historical cryptography. The story goes that back in 1918, a cipher system/machine was invented by John F. Byrne. Rumor says that it was very strong, and yet could be implemented using a mechanism that would fit in […]

A couple of weeks ago during lunch, someone had mentioned that a breakthrough in the world of cryptography had occurred: that someone had succeeded in creating something called a “homomorphic encryption scheme”. The thing was, nobody at the table really understood what that was all about. I did a brief bit of reading on it, […]

Sometimes, your interests converge. Over on Programming Praxis, he had a coding challenge to implement Monte Carlo factorization. The last couple of days, I have been thinking a bit more about factorization, so it seemed like a good idea to give it a whack. I cribbed a version of the Rabin Miller primality tester off […]

Back in 2007, I made a blog post entitled “Code Challenge”, where I put forth a code challenge. Code Challenge | brainwagon. Nobody took the challenge. But what was slightly odder was that I had no recollection of making this challenge, or even what type of cipher it was. The only clue that I had […]

The other day, my friend Jeff sent me an email detailing the latest benchmarking of his new 8 core Intel box. He had written a program to compute return rates for all possible draws in video poker. A few years ago, this program had taken a month of computer time to complete, and he wondered […]

For all the people who’ve come to see this as my ham radio blog, I apologize, but I do have other interests, and computer security is one of them. It’s not that I am any kind of expert, but I have played around quite a bit with various bits of computer security and cryptography over […]

While my blog has been dominated by radio related stuff lately, I do continue to be interested in lots of different subjects, including various topics related to computer security and codes. While scanning my feeds today, I found reference to this work, which I hadn’t seen before, but which I find interesting both for its […]

You might have noticed if you are a long time reader of this blog that I’m fascinated by codes and ciphers, particularly the kind that were developed before computers really came on the scene.   That’s why I’m finding the M4 Message Breaking Project interesting: they are attempting to break three two as yet unbroken code […]

Xerox printers use a watermarking technique to insert codes onto all printed documents from their Docucolor color laser printers. These identify date, time and printer serial number with a grid of yellow dots which appear in the printout. Presumably these codes are inserted to make the job of the Secret Service simpler in tracking their […]

Sigh. Things like this really depress me. Minnesota court takes dim view of encryption | CNET News.com A Minnesota appeals court has ruled that the presence of encryption software on a computer may be viewed as evidence of criminal intent. From the PGP FAQ: Who uses PGP? People who value privacy use PGP. Politicians running […]

I’ve been interested in codes and cryptography for quite some time. I find them at the fascinating intersection of history, mathematics and computer science: all topics that I like to read about and experiment with. Let me give you a basic crypto lesson, with a moral at the end. Let’s say that all your messages […]

Interesting link of the day, courtesy of Boing Boing: FM 34-40-2 Basic Cryptanalysis. The truth is this kind of cryptography is pretty much of historical interest only, but I find historic codes to be, well, interesting.

This EFF-funded project sounds very interesting. It attempts to provide anonymity by making traffic analysis difficult by using something called an onion router. I’ll have to read more about it. Tor: An anonymous Internet communication system Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and […]

The GCHQ has a bit of a Christmas challenge: break the code they have on their website, and be entered in a drawing for winning a copy of Simon Singh’s latest book. Cool. Check it out! Jeff and I might have something to do over the new year.

Here is an interesting early paper on the justification, implementation, analysis and use of random number generators, written in 1959. The resulting machine generated about 5000 bits per second, not bad! Via Boing Boing. By the way, random numbers are still cool.