One very handy feature of public key encryption is that both the public or the private key can be used to encrypt something, which can then only be decrypted with the remaining key. If you remember from my previous Blog entry, I mainly focused on the case where someone encrypts a message with a public [...]
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Last week I went through symmetric encryption, and explained why it is not accepted as a great fit for secure communication. Today I’ll talk about asymmetric encryption and public key infrastructure. The invention of asymmetric encryption as we use it today is attributed to a publication by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman in 1976, who were [...] PKI, or Public Key Infrastructure has been around for over 3 decades now, yet it is still an enigma for your average lay-person even though they use it regularly while they are shopping online, exchanging encrypted emails or using other security systems. Yet, only a fraction of users really understand what exactly a certificate is, [...] Now that we know how to calculate the number of operations we need for each type of password, and have a tool to experiement with, let’s calculate how long will it take for a modern computer to break passwords of different strengths. This is a bit tricky as computers have different calculating powers, multiple [...] To perform a brute-force attack on a password, one needs to generate words for every possible combination of letters one by one, and then calculate the hash of each generated word to see if it matches the hash of the password in hand. To demonstrate the basics of how attackers try to get a hold [...] A while back I wrote about cryptographic hash functions and how they are used to authenticate people with a password. Today I’ll try to go over common ways of attacking passwords in an effort to help you choose better passwords, yet still be able remember them when you need to. As this text got bigger [...] Hash functions are one of the fundamental components of modern cryptography, so I thought it might be a good place to start talking about more advanced concepts. A hash function is a mathematical procedure that converts arbitrarily length data into fixed size binary strings. For example: “” (empty string) “test” “A really long text to demonstrate the fact that the [...] I first got introduced to the Rubik’s Cube when I was about 10 years old. That was early 80′s and it was almost as hip as heavy metal music and mullets; so you had to try hard not to bump into one. I happened to be a boarding student at the time, and all of [...] Cryptography is a word derived from two ancient Greek words, kryptos and graphein which mean hidden and write, respectively. Although the direct translation means something like “hidden write/text”, it is actually the meaning of the text that is hidden, not the text itself. Hiding the medium on which the message was written is named as “steganography”, [...] |
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