The hardest contract I've taken
2024-08-10 03:14 by Ian
This is a description of the most difficult contract I've ever taken: Building a pirate cellphone tower to crack GSM's weakest deployed stream cipher, and ultimately recover an entire recorded phone call.
The state of my exposure to cryptographic libraries
2016-09-30 14:56 by Ian
This is a quick overview of the cryptographic libraries I have deep experience with.
Intro to DTLS
2016-09-24 21:25 by Ian
This post is aimed at technical readers who know what TLS is used for, but may know nothing about its operation. It is also an attempt to explain why DTLS was developed, and how it applies to IoT.
Symmetrical asymmetries
2016-09-24 21:10 by Ian
This is one of a series of posts I will be writing that cover various security-related algorithms. This post will be a brief survey of the two major classes of reversible encryption algorithms.
How will quantum computers impact cryptography?
2016-05-01 21:32 by Ian
This post is an effort to short-circuit some FUD regarding the susceptibility of different classes of cryptographic algorithms to attacks made possible by quantum computers.
Building the CAVP Test Apparatus
2013-04-02 17:21 by Ian
The last entry gave a quick practical overview for building a FIPS capable OpenSSL. This one will explain how to compile a program against it. The particular program I will be compiling is one that I wrote to execute a set of test-vectors issued by NIST's CAVP.
Bury it under the noise floor (Steganography)
2013-03-22 08:59 by Ian
Here is discussed a PHP program to hide encrypted messages and files inside of images without significantly changing the way the image looks. This is meant to be an instructional write-up to touch on some common ideas and mechanisms in cryptography.
Building a FIPS capable OpenSSL (Gentoo)
2013-03-08 08:24 by Ian
This is an anecdotal account of building OpenSSL with the FIPS container module on Gentoo. However, these instructions should be applicable to any other distribution with minimal translation effort. The result will be a static OpenSSL build suitable for inclusion into secure application software.