ASecuritySite Podcast

This seminar series runs for students on the Network Security and Cryptography module, but invites guests to participate. Bruce has created a wide range of cryptographic methods including Skein (hash function), Helix (stream cipher), Fortuna (random number generator), and Blowfish/Twofish/Threefish (block ciphers).

Bruce has published 14 books, including best-sellers such as Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World. He has also published hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers. Currently, Bruce is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Overall, Brent was the first to propose Attribute-based Encryption (ABE) and also the first to outline functional encryption. He was also awarded the Sloan Research Fellowship in 2010, and, in 2015, he was awarded the Grace Murray Hopper Award for his work on ABE and functional encryption.

Brent's research has been cited over 68,700 times for his research work, and has provided a core foundation for cybersecurity to move towards methods that provide fine-grained data access.

Well, as if cybersecurity doesn't have enough acronyms. There's RIP, OSPF, TCP, IP, SSH, AES, and so many others. Now, there are three really important ones to remember: ML-KEM (Module Lattice-Based Key Encapsulation Mechanism), ML-DSA (Module Lattice-Based Signature Standard) and SLH-DSA (Stateless Hash-based Digital Signature Standard). ML-KEM is defined in the FIPS 203 standard, ML-DSA as FIPS 204, and for SLH-DSA, we have FIPS 205.

https://medium.com/@billatnapier/get-used-to-three-boring-acronyms-ml-kem-ml-dsa-and-slh-dsa-0156b6ab82c5

The cybersecurity world is changing, and where the signature methods of RSA, ECDSA and EdDSA are likely to be replaced by FIPS 204 (aka ML-DSA Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Standard— Dilithium) and FIPS 205 (aka SLH-DSA (Stateless Hash-based Digital Signature Standard — SPHINCS+)

https://medium.com/@billatnapier/so-what-is-a-prehash-and-what-has-it-to-do-with-post-quantum-signatures-bf7812cfa203

In cybersecurity, there are so many acronyms, and to be an expert, you really need to dig underneath the methods and understand how they work. One weak area of the industry is in the usage of MACs (Message Authentication Codes).

With the public-key signing, we use a public key and a private key, where the private key will digitally sign a hash of the message, and where the public key is verified the signature. With a MAC, we use a shared symmetric key, and where Bob and Alice will share the same secret key (Figure 1).

https://medium.com/@billatnapier/cmac-or-hmac-which-is-better-8e1861f744d0

Article: https://medium.com/asecuritysite-when-bob-met-alice/the-brainpool-curves-f2f865b88191

Article: https://medium.com/asecuritysite-when-bob-met-alice/our-current-hardware-architectures-are-often-not-fit-for-a-world-of-ml-and-homomorphic-encryption-1df5a4a45a4d

Article: https://billatnapier.medium.com/nist-looks-to-the-future-of-cryptography-sha-1-3des-and-sha-224-on-naughty-step-7295d03fdc54

Read more: https://medium.com/asecuritysite-when-bob-met-alice/goodbye-google-and-the-microsoft-and-openai-partnership-fraying-8c35e35cd814

Read more: https://medium.com/asecuritysite-when-bob-met-alice/the-wonderful-world-of-proxies-818c196290ff