ASecuritySite Podcast

Amit Gupta is the founder and CEO of Acubed.IT, which is a company which creates innovative and secure cross-security domain solutions for customers such as the UK government. One of their key innovations is the Cross Domain Hybrid Application (CDHA) framework, and which aims to break down the barriers in sharing trusted information across multiple partner agencies.

Please excuse the poor quality of my microphone, as the wrong microphone was selected.

In research, we are all just building on the shoulders of true giants, and there are few larger giants than Leslie Lamport — the creator of LaTeX. For me, every time I open up a LaTeX document, I think of the work he did on creating LaTeX, and which makes my research work so much more productive. If I was still stuck with Microsoft Office for research, I would spend half of my time in that horrible equation editor, or in trying to integrate the references into the required format, or in formatting Header 1 and Header 2 to have a six-point spacing underneath. So, for me, the contest between LaTeX and Microsoft Word is a knock-out in the first round. And one of the great things about Leslie is that his work is strongly academic — and which provides foundations for others to build on. For this, he did a great deal on the ordering of task synchronisation, in state theory, cryptography signatures, and fault tolerance. LaTeX I really can say enough about how much LaTeX — created in 1984 — helps my work. I am writing a few books just now, and it allows me to lay out the books in the way that I want to deliver the content. There's no need for a further mark-up, as I work on the output that the reader will see. But the true genius of LaTeX is the way that teams can work on a paper, and where there can be async to GitHub and where version control is then embedded. Clocks Many in the research community think that the quality measure of a paper is the impact factor of the journal that it is submitted to, or in the amount of maths that it contains. But, in the end, it is the impact of the paper, and how it changes thinking. For Leslie, in 1978, his paper on clocks changed our scientific world and is one of the most cited papers in computer science. Byzantine Generals Problem In 1981, Leslie B Lamport defined the Byzantine Generals Problem. And in a research world where you can have 100s of references in a paper, Leslie only used four (and which would probably not be accepted these days for having so few references). Within this paper, the generals of a Byzantine army have to agree to their battle plan, in the face of adversaries passing in order information. In the end, we aim to create a way of passing messages where if at least two out of three of the generals are honest, we will end up with the correct battle plan. The Lamport Signature Sometime soon, we perhaps need to wean ourselves of our existing public key methods and look to techniques that are more challenging for quantum computers. With the implementation of Shor's algorithm [here] on quantum computers, we will see our RSA and Elliptic Curve methods being replaced by methods which are quantum robust. One method is the Lamport signature method and which was created by Leslie B. Lamport in 1979.

Daniel J Bernstein (djb) was born in 1971. He is a USA/German citizen and a Personal Professor at Eindhoven University of Technology and a Research Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

At the tender age of 24 — in 1995 — he, along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation — brought a case against the US Government related to the protection of free speech (Bernstein v. United States: here). It resulted in a ruling that software should be included in the First Amendment. A core contribution is that it has reduced government regulations around cryptography. It was a sign of the greatness that was to come from the amazing mind of Daniel. His viewpoint on reducing the strength of cryptography at the time defined:

"There are, fortunately, not many terrorists in the world. But there are many criminals exploiting Internet vulnerabilities for economic gain. They infiltrate computers and steal whatever secrets they can find, from individual credit-card numbers to corporate business plans. There are also quite a few vandals causing trouble just for fun."

Since then few others have done so much for the cause of privacy, including creating the Sala20 [link] stream cipher in 2005, and then with ChaCha20 [link] and Poly1305 in 2008. Many connections in TLS now use ChaCha20, rather than AES, as it is faster — over three times after than AES — and has a lower computing requirement. His love of using dance names also comes to the fore with Rumba [here].

It is not just in symmetric key encryption that he has contributed to, he has made significant contributions to public key encryption. In 2005, he defined the Curve 25519 elliptic curve, and which is now a fairly standard way of defining elliptic curves. For signatures, he then defined Ed25519, and the resultant version of a new EdDSA signature (and which is now included in OpenSSH). The Tor protocol, for example, uses Curve 25519 for its key exchange for each of the nodes involved in a secure route.

He defined the SPHINCS+ method for PQC digital signatures. This is one of the NIST approved methods for quantum robust signatures.

In 2015, Daniel defined the methods that the NSA may have used to compromise the NIST defined elliptic curves [paper]. And 2005, it was Daniel again who introduced a new type of attack [here].

Daniel run his Web site from https://cr.yp.to

More details: https://medium.com/asecuritysite-when-bob-met-alice/a-lifetime-dedicated-to-citizens-rights-to-privacy-daniel-j-bernstein-ab5ab2bf0dc6

Jan is the CTO and a Cryptographer at DFINITY, and, since 1998, he has consistently produced research outputs of rigour, novelty and sheer brilliance [here]. He was recently awarded the Levchin Prize at Real World Crypto 2024 - along with Anna Lysyanskaya.

Jan's research core happened when he was hosted in the IBM Zurich Research Lab, but has since moved to DFINITY, and is still producing research outputs that are some of the best in the whole of the computer science research area.

He has published over 140 widely cited papers and has been granted around 140 patents. Jan has also received the ACM SIGSCA Outstanding Innovation Award and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award.

One of his key research outputs relates to the CL signature, which allows for a private, aware digital signature, along with many other contributions, such as range proofs, oblivious transfer, and privacy-aware identity mapping between domains.

More details here: https://medium.com/asecuritysite-when-bob-met-alice/the-mighty-jan-cryptographic-genius-36a66a02ff86

Ted Miracco is the CEO of Approov and which is Scottish/US company that is headquartered in Edinburgh. Miracco has over 30 years of experience in cybersecurity, defence electronics, RF/microwave circuit design, semiconductors and electronic design automation (EDA). He co-founded and served as CEO of Cylynt, which focuses on intellectual property and compliance protection

Troy is a world-leading cybersecurity professional. He created and runs the Have I Been Pwned? Web site, and which contains details of the most significant data breaches on the Internet. Along with this, he has developed other security tools, such as ASafaWeb, which automated the security analysis of ASP.NET Web sites. Troy is based in Australia and has an extensive blog at https://www.troyhunt.com.

This is Day 0 of a new world of cybersecurity. Everything changes from here.

There will be a time before Generative AI (GenAI) in cybersecurity and a time after it. Over the last two years, GenAI has come on leaps and bounds, and where it once suffered from hallucinations, took racist and bigoted approaches, and often was over-assertive, within ChatGPT 4.5, we see the rise of a friendly and slightly submissive agent, and that is eager to learn from us. This LLM (Large Language Model) approach thus starts to break down the barriers between humans and computers and brings the opportunity to gain access to a new world of knowledge, but, in the wrong hands, it will bring many threats to our current world.

There will be few areas, though, that will be affected more by the rise of Gen AI than cybersecurity. Why? Because the minute our adversories use it, we are in trouble. The hacking tools and methods of the past will soon look like the Morris Worm of the past. The threat landscape will see the rise of superintelligence and in providing ways for adversories to continually probe defences and gain a foothold.

This seminar series runs for students on the Applied Cryptography and Trust module, but invites guests from students from across the university. Martin is one of the co-creators of public key encryption, and worked alongside Whitfield Diffie in the creation of the widely used Diffie-Hellman method. In 2015, he was presented with the ACM Turing Award (the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in Computer Science) for his contribution to computer science. He is currently a professor emeritus at Stanford University. https://engineering.stanford.edu/node/9141/printable/print https://ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/

Vincent Rijmen is one of the co-creators of the NIST-defined AES standard (also known as Rijndael). He also co-designed the WHIRLPOOL hashing method, along with designing other block ciphers, such as Square and SHARK.

In 2002, Vincent was included in the Top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35, and, along with Joan Daemen, was awarded the RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics. He recently joined Cryptomathic as a chief cryptographer, and also holds a professor position (gewoon hoogleraar) at K.U.Leuven, and adjunct professorship at the University of Bergen, Norway. His paper on the design of the Rijndael method has been cited over 8,900 times, and he has received over 26,000 citations for his research work: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=zBQxZrcAAAAJ

Whitfield Diffie is one of the greatest Computer Scientists ever. He - along with Marty Hellman - was one of the first to propose the usage of public key encryption and co-created the Diffie-Hellman (DH) key exchange method. Overall, the Diffie-Hellman method is still used in virtually every Web connection on the Internet, and has changed from using discrete log methods to elliptic curve methods. In 2015, Whitfield was also awarded the ACM Turing Prize - and which is the Nobel Prize equivalent in Computer Science. In this on-line talk he meets with Edinburgh Napier University students, but the chat is open to anyone who would like to listen to Whitfield.