For The Love of Crypto and Solving Mysteries: Meet Dan Shumow

Education is not something you do at school, college or university, and then finish. Education is for life!

And so my tip for staying ahead is to continually learn and push yourself. You need to know the new things, but also to look ahead to the horizon. For me, I pick a research paper to read, and then try to read it in detail, and understand what its purpose is, and how it could change thinking. I appreciate it is a challenge sometimes, but you will find a few which will change your viewpoints on things.

The most recent research paper that made a significant effect on my thinking is one by Dan Shumow, and which outlined a real cryptography vulnerability in Windows 10, and where corrupt encryption keys were created. In fact, around one in every 32,000 keys were corrupt. And, so, Dan loves this type of thing and focused on solving the mystery.

It resulted in my favouriate research paper of this year [here]:

I’ve read it back to front, and really understand the problem statement and how Dan has delivered on this. For me, I had forever taught RSA, but never really understood the consequences of not…