1. Porting Godwin's Law to the field of cryptography.

    19 August 2013

    On the Internet, there exists a meme called Godwin's Law. Simply put, "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one," (where probabilities are specified as floating point values between 0.0 (0%) and 1.0 (100%)). It is usually at this point that the discussion is considered completely derailed and no longer worth following.

    It seems that a similar phenomenon is occurring more and more often in the twenty-first century, in which online discussions of cryptographic or security software will eventually lead to someone bringing up Ken Thompson's famous paper Reflections …

    Read more...

  2. Dominant discourse.

    18 August 2013

    Since the NSA revelations began coming a couple of times a week for the past month, an all too common set of dialogues has been cropping up again and again and again in practically every forum that one would care to visit. While the discussion itself isn't perfectly replicated the overall pattern is. It goes something like this:


    • Brief description of vulnerability. Mitigating tactic.
    • Mention of a vulnerability elsewhere in the user's system.
    • Description of a slightly more esoteric vulnerability.
    • Use another system.
    • Encrypt everything.
    • Quantum computer.
    • Use Tor.
    • Tor can't protect against country-level surveillance.
    • NSA backdoor.
    • The NSA has …

    Read more...

  3. A trip to the International Spy Museum.

    03 August 2013

    A couple of weekends ago Lyssa, Laurelindel and I did something that we've wanted to do for months, which was visit the International Spy Museum in downtown DC. This year their big thing is a 50 year James Bond retrospective, where they had props and models from the movies on display in addition to their other exhibits. Unfortunately, my camera was in macro mode the whole time so not all of the pictures I took came out the way I'd hoped. I kept the best of the photographs.

    Here they are.

    Talking about the Spy Museum over dinner, we made …

    Read more...

  4. Cryptsetup benchmarks for a Dell 17r.

    01 August 2013

    For no good reason today I decided to run some cryptsetup benchmarks on Windbringer. The only really significant change to the systemware configuration is that Windbringer is now running Linux kernel version 3.9.4-1-ARCH.

    [drwho@windbringer ~]$ cryptsetup benchmark
    # Tests are approximate using memory only (no storage IO).
    PBKDF2-sha1       407688 iterations per second
    PBKDF2-sha256     222155 iterations per second
    PBKDF2-sha512     144511 iterations per second
    PBKDF2-ripemd160  334367 iterations per second
    PBKDF2-whirlpool  187245 iterations per second
    #  Algorithm | Key |  Encryption |  Decryption
         aes-cbc   128b   563.0 MiB/s  1862.0 MiB/s
     serpent-cbc   128b    67.7 …

    Read more...

  5. Cryptoparty presentation: Whole Disk Encryption

    31 July 2013

    At the DC Cryptoparty in October of 2012 I did two presentations: One on GnuPG and one on whole disk encryption. While I'd put the GnuPG presentation online I hadn't done the same for the disk encryption one because I had to update it after the cryptoparty to take into account new information acquired that afternoon regarding MacOSX and Windows. I did so, converted the OpenOffice Presentation deck into a PDF, PGP signed them, and uploaded them this afternoon.

    v1.0 of the WDE presentation is now available for download:

    Read more...

  6. Gareth Branwyn: Borg Like Me.

    29 July 2013

    Older denizens of the Net probably remember the name Gareth Branwyn. His name and visage were well known amongst people who were active in what came to be known as the cyberculture of the late 1980's and early 1990's, that weird mish-mash of hacker culture, people who identified as cyberpunks, psychedelic culture, rave culture, and other tiny social groups so far out on the fringe that they never really coalesced but instead moved in the cracks and fissues left in the wake of those other groups. Most of us remember two major projects he worked on at the time, the …

    Read more...

64 / 207