Cryptography FM

By Symbolic Software

Technology Tech News

What's Cryptography FM about?

Cryptography FM is a regular podcast with news and a featured interview covering the latest developments in theoretical and applied cryptography. Whether it's a new innovative paper on lattice-based cryptography or a novel attack on a secure messaging protocol, we'll get the people behind it on Cryptography FM.

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Cryptography FM episodes:

02.27.2023
Episode 24: CryptoHack's Collection of Cryptic Conundrums!
For several years, CryptoHack has been a free platform for learning modern cryptography through fun and challenging programming puzzles. From toy ciphers to post-quantum cryptography, CryptoHack has a wide-ranging and ever increasing library of puzzles for both the aspiring and...
01.25.2023
Episode 23: Psychic Signatures in Java!
On April 19th 2022, Neil Madden disclosed a vulnerability in many popular Java runtimes and development kits. The vulnerability, dubbed "Psychic Signatures", lies in the cryptography for ECDSA signatures and allows an attacker to bypass signature checks entirely for these...
01.16.2023
Episode 22: Three Lessons from Threema: Breaking a Secure Messenger!
Threema is a Swiss encrypted messaging application. It has more than 10 million users and more than 7000 on-premise customers. Prominent users of Threema include the Swiss Government and the Swiss Army, as well as the current Chancellor of Germany,...
08.24.2021
Episode 21: Proving Fundamental Equivalencies in Isogeny Mathematics!
Benjamin Wesolowski talks about his latest paper in which he mathematically proved that the two fundamental problems underlying isogeny-based cryptography are equivalent. Links and papers discussed in the show: The supersingular isogeny path and endomorphism ring problems are equivalent Episode 5: Isogeny-based Cryptography...
07.20.2021
Episode 20: Cryptanalysis of GPRS: GEA-1 and GEA-2!
A team of cryptanalysits presents the first publicly available cryptanalytic attacks on the GEA-1 and GEA-2 algorithms. Instead of providing full 64-bit security, they show that the initial state of GEA-1 can be recovered from as little as 65 bits...
07.12.2021
Episode 19: Cross-Protocol Attacks on TLS with ALPACA!
TLS is an internet standard to secure the communication between servers and clients on the internet, for example that of web servers, FTP servers, and Email servers. This is possible because TLS was designed to be application layer independent, which...
06.23.2021
Episode 18: Optimizing Cryptography for Microcontrollers!
Nadim talks with Peter Schwabe and Matthias Kannwischer about the considerations — both in terms of security and performance — when implementing cryptographic primitives for low-level and embedded platforms. Links and papers discussed in the show: Optimizing crypto on embedded microcontrollers Implementing post-quantum...
06.01.2021
Episode 17: Breaking Wi-Fi With Frame Attacks!
Wi-Fi is a pretty central technology to our daily lives, whether at home or at the office. Given that so much sensitive data is regularly exchanged between Wi-Fi devices, a number of standards have been developed to ensure the privacy...
05.24.2021
Episode 16: Contact Discovery in Mobile Messengers!
Contact discovery is a core feature in popular mobile messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram that lets users grant access to their address book in order to discover which of their contacts are on that messaging service. While...
04.26.2021
Episode 15: Bringing Secure Multiparty Computation to the Real World!
Secure multi-party computation is a fascinating field in cryptography, researching how to allow multiple parties to compute secure operations over inputs while keeping those inputs private. This makes multi-party computation a super relevant technology in areas such as code signing,...
03.30.2021
Episode 14: Schnorr, Factoring and Lattices!
On March 1st, 2021, a curious paper appeared on the Cryptology ePrint Archive: senior cryptographer Claus Peter Schnorr submitted research that claims to use lattice mathematics to improve the fast factoring of integers so much that he was able to...
03.14.2021
Episode 13: Zero-Knowledge STARKs in the Real World!
Zero-Knowledge proofs have broadened the realm of use cases for applied cryptography over the past decade, from privacy-enhanced cryptocurrencies to applications in voting, finance, protecting medical data and more. In 2018, Dr. Eli Ben-Sasson and his team introduced ZK-STARKs, a...
01.07.2021
Episode 12: Special Real World Crypto 2021 Pre-Conference Coverage!
Every year, the IACR Real World Cryptography symposium brings together researchers, engineers and practitioners in applied cryptography to discuss cryptography that matters, in the real world. To me, this is the big one! The one cryptography conference that matters the...
12.08.2020
Episode 11: Breaking the Rainbow Post-Quantum Cryptography Candidate!
The race for post-quantum cryptographic signature primitives is in its final lap over at NIST, which recently announced DILITHIUM, FALCON and Rainbow as the three signature primitive finalists. But a paper recently published by KU Leuven researcher Ward Beullens claims...
12.01.2020
Episode 10: Exploiting Authenticated Encryption Key Commitment!
Authenticated encryption such as AES-GCM or ChaCha20-Poly1305 is used in a wide variety of applications, including potentially in settings for which it was not originally designed. A question given relatively little attention is whether an authenticated encryption scheme guarantees “key...
11.20.2020
Episode 9: Off-the-Record Messaging and PKI Implementations!
Before there was Signal, before there was WhatsApp, the realm of secure encrypted messaging was ruled by the Off-the-Record secure messaging protocol, created as an alternative to PGP that introduced security properties like forward secrecy and deniability that were considered...
11.17.2020
Episode‌ ‌8:‌ ‌Breaking‌ ‌Elliptic-Curve‌ ‌Signatures‌ ‌With‌ ‌LadderLeak!‌
Elliptic-curve signatures have become a highly used cryptographic primitive in secure messaging, TLS as well as in cryptocurrencies due to their high speed benefits over more traditional signature schemes. However, virtually all signature schemes are known to be susceptible to...
11.10.2020
Episode 7: Scaling Up Secure Messaging to Large Groups With MLS!
Secure messaging protocols like Signal have succeeded at making end-to-end encryption the norm in messaging more generally. Whether you’re using WhatsApp, Wire, Facebook Messenger’s Secret Chat feature, or Signal itself, you’re benefiting from end-to-end encryption across all of your messages...
11.03.2020
Episode 6: Proving the Existence of Vulnerabilities With Zero-Knowledge Proofs!
Zero-knowledge proofs have been a notorious research target ever since Zcash and other cryptocurrencies have invented lots of new use cases for them. Range proofs, bullet proofs, you name it – all kinds of zero-knowledge mechanisms have received more and...
10.27.2020
Episode 5: Isogeny-based Cryptography for Dummies!
The NIST post-quantum competition has started a race for post-quantum cryptography. As a result, we’ve seen a great deal of research into alternative hard mathematical problems to use as a basis for public-key cryptography schemes. Lattice-based cryptography! Error-correcting code based...
10.20.2020
Episode 4: Formally Verifying Your Taxes With Catala!
Anyone who’s looked at the French civil code -- or, God forbid, the French tax code -- will tell you that it takes more than a mere human mind to decipher its meaning, given how it’s been growing and growing...
10.13.2020
Episode 3: BLAKE3, A Parallelizable Hash Function Using Merkle Trees!
Ever since its introduction in 2012, the BLAKE hash function has been reputed for achieving performance matching and even exceeding MD5 while still maintaining a high security margin. While the original BLAKE did make it as a finalist to the NIST...
10.06.2020
Episode 2: Breaking Lightweight Symmetric Cryptography!
Aside from working on a competition for standardizing post-quantum primitives, the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, has also organized a lightweight cryptography competition meant to attract designs for symmetric primitives, such as hash functions and...
09.29.2020
Episode 1: Post-Quantum TLS With KEMs Instead of Signatures!
TLS 1.3 has been widely praised as a major upgrade to the Transport Layer Security protocol responsible for securing the majority of Web traffic. But one area in which TLS 1.3 seems to be lacking is its potential for resistance...