ASecuritySite Podcast

I have a secret. And you have a secret. And together, we can merge our secret into another secret. What I am outlining here is the beauty of the Elliptic Curve Diffie Hellman (ECDH) method, and it is protecting your rights to privacy in the access that you have to this podcast. And what about trust? Well, there's a chance that the Web site that you are receiving this podcast from is using the ECDSA (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm) to verify that you can trust the site.

And, so, in this podcast, I'm going to outline something that is pure mathematical beauty: the Elliptic Curve.

There are more information on ECC [here] and the text to this Podcast is [here].

Here Harry McLaren talks with Rich Macfarlane and Bill Buchanan. What's the key to finding a job within Cybersecurity? A balance of technical competencies (networking, OS, services, programming, and so on) and human intelligence (self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skills).

The slides are here.

For Splunk/Cyber&Data: here.

This is a basic introduction to the Building Trust podcast.

In this episode Professor William Buchanan OBE takes us back through the patents that gave rise to the security for the internet as we know it.

In this podcast, we will outline some of the design choices that Satoshi Nakamoto made for the hashing of the private key to the public ID, especially on the selection of the two hashing methods of SHA-256 and RIPEMD160.

So how do we create a world where we can store our secrets in a trusted and then reveal them when required? Let's say I predict the outcome of an election, but I don't want to reveal my prediction until after the election. Well, I could store a commitment to my prediction, and then at some time in the future, I could reveal it to you, and you can check against the commitment I have made. Anyone who views my commitment should not be able to see what my prediction is.

This is known as Pedersen Commitment, and where we produce our commitment and then show the message that matches the commitment. In its core form, we can implement a Pedersen Commitment in discrete logs [here]. But blockchain, IoT, Tor, and many other application areas, now use elliptic curve methods, so let's see if we can make a commitment with them.

Note: TeamViewer is not a malicious piece of software when normally used. The scammer wanted to install a remote desktop on my machine with it.

Jean-Philippe (JP) Aumasson is a true innovator in cryptography, and especially in the creation of fast, secure and light-weight hashing methods. He co-designed the BLAKE hashing method [here], and which is currently the fastest secure cryptographic hashing function. Along with this, he worked with Daniel J Bernstein on SipHash [here], and created the Cryptography Coding Standard. JP also created the Quark light-weight hashing method, and is also the author of "Serious Cryptography: A Practical Introduction to Modern Encryption" [here].

Neal I. Koblitz is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington. He is a co-inventor of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). His original paper was published in 1987 and entitled "Elliptic curve cryptosystems" [1]. Overall, ECC is one of the greatest breakthroughs in cryptography and which has largely replaced discrete logarithm methods in key exchange and has replaced the RSA method in many applications for digital signing. Overall, elliptic curve methods are now used extensively with digital signing (ECDSA/EdDSA) and for key exchange (ECDH), along with applications into Bitcoin and Ethereum. Neal was recently recognized for his work with the Levchin Prize at the real-world cryptography conference. His recent work has included applications for lattice cryptography and random oracles. Neal is also the author of several leading textbooks:

[1] Koblitz, N. (1994). A course in number theory and cryptography (Vol. 114). Springer Science & Business Media.

In this episode Professor William Buchanan OBE talks with Professor Keith Martin, from the Royal Holloway, about the intersection of information security and academia, privacy and digital footprints.