The security of RSA encryption depends on the fact that the product of two large primes is difficult to factor. So if p and q are large primes, say 2048 bits each, then you can publish n = pq with little fear that someone can factor n to recover p and q. But if you […]
Category: Security
SQRL: Secure Quick Reliable Login
Steve Gibson’s Security Now is one of the podcasts I regularly listen to, and so I’ve been hearing him talk about his SQRL for a while. This week he finally released SQRL: Secure Quick Reliable Login. You can read more about SQRL in the white paper posted on the GRC web site. Here’s a tease […]
Microsoft replacing SHA-1
According to this article, Microsoft is patching Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 to look for SHA-2 hash functions of updates. These older versions of Windows have been using SHA-1, while newer version are already using SHA-2. This is a good move, but unnecessary. Here’s what I mean by that. The update was likely unnecessary […]
Hash function menagerie
Here’s an oversimplified survey of cryptographic hash functions: Everyone used to use MD5, now they use some variation on SHA. There’s some truth to that. MD5 was very popular, and remains popular years after it was proven insecure. And now variations on SHA like SHA1 and SHA256 are commonly used. But there are a lot […]
Economics, power laws, and hacking
Increasing costs impact some players more than others. Those who know about power laws and know how to prioritize are impacted less than those who naively believe everything is equally important. This post will look at economics and power laws in the context of password cracking. Increasing the cost of verifying a password does not […]
Salting and stretching a password
This post will look at a progression of ways to store passwords, from naive to sophisticated. Most naive: clear text Storing passwords in plain text is least secure thing a server could do. If this list is leaked, someone knows all the passwords with no effort. Better: hash values A better approach would be to […]
Reversing an MD5 hash
The MD5 hashing algorithm was once considered secure cryptographic hash, but those days are long gone [1]. For a given hash value, it doesn’t take much computing power to create a document with the same hash. Hash functions are not reversible in general. MD5 is a 128-bit hash, and so it maps any string, no […]
Base 32 and base 64 encoding
Math has a conventional way to represent numbers in bases larger than 10, and software development has a couple variations on this theme that are only incidentally mathematical. Math convention By convention, math books typically represent numbers in bases larger than 10 by using letters as new digit symbols following 9. For example, base 16 […]
RSA with Pseudoprimes
RSA setup Recall the setup for RSA encryption given in the previous post. Select two very large prime numbers p and q. Compute n = pq and φ(n) = (p – 1)(q – 1). Choose an encryption key e relatively prime to φ(n). Calculate the decryption key d such that ed = 1 (mod φ(n)). Publish e and n, and keep d, p, and q secret. φ is Euler’s totient function, defined here. There’s a complication in the first […]
Revealing information by trying to suppress it
FAS posted an article yesterday explaining how blurring military installations out of satellite photos points draws attention to them, showing exactly where they are and how big they are. The Russian mapping service Yandex Maps blurred out sensitive locations in Israel and Turkey. As the article says, this is an example of the Streisand effect, […]