Secure communications/ crypto. An introduction. Plain and simple

Really basic 'how does this work?' stuff

Why cryptography?

Thanks for an interesting article!

Personally I think that this is a prime example of the cultural difference in intelligence work between the US and the old Soviet Union, and it’s creating trouble today.

To compress the reasoning: the US, with the success of Magic and Ultra in WWII the US went all…

Yes it would be nice, but this column really isn’t about apportioning credit for breakthroughs but contextualizing the discoveries to discuss what’s happening today. As for the GHCQ work, the point is that even though Ellis et al did work on what we now recognize as public key, it was like it never happened, because none of it was available to even…

PGP comes to Facebook

The Committee to Project Journalist notes it is now possible to attach a PGP key to one’s Facebook profile. This is another in a series of steps Facebook has taken recently to secure its networks, from HTTPS at every endpoint to enabling connections via Tor. The PGP feature lets anyone add…

Beyond brainwallets : Question wallets

This article proposes a solution which retains the qualities of brainwallets, while having none of it defaults. The idea is to use personal questions as a seed to create a brainwallet. This idea can be generalized to sensitive passwords and offer some unique and…