Group items tagged

"Latest on the computer analyst whistleblower who provided the Guardian with top-secret NSA documents leading to revelations about US surveillance on phone and internet communications" - compilation of news sources on Edward Snowden

Very interesting article that begins with the story of Mary, Queen of Scots, and continues to speak about different techniques of encryption that are harder and harder to break. It also deals with the fact that Mary's messages were being intercepted and the article speaks about secure encryption using photons where you would know if your message was intercepted.

This post is about cracking the vigenere cipher. It also uses computer programming to solve it which I found interesting.

Encrypted analysis of data in the cloud would allow secure access to sensitive information.

Homomorphic encryption is pretty amazing. What they're proposing in this article is a bit like having a computer analyze an encrypted novel and determining which sentences were grammatically incorrect--without even knowing what the plaintext sentences were!

The International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) is a non-profit scientific organization whose purpose is to further research in cryptology and related fields. Cryptology is the science and practice of designing computation and communication systems which are secure in the presence of adversaries.

Embeddable cryptographic processors are enabling a host of new defense communications applications, such as smartphones and tablet computers for tactical use on the front lines, but should soldiers be using the same object for both secure and insecure communications? Or does this create a conflict of interests?

This is an article about the advancement of technology and how it has affected cryptography and secret-keeping during wartime.

I'm just going to resubmit the bookmark directly to this page so I'll be sure it ends up publicly in the group. This wasn't mentioned in Singh chapter 2, but it was created around the time period discussed in the chapter. (Plus, it's one of my favorite articles I've read in Wired so I really wanted to use it as a bookmark.) The article discusses the strategies used to break this cipher, some of which, such as frequency analysis, we have talked about in class. It's also just fascinating to read about the Oculists and their history.

This will only be seen by our class.

What a tangled web we weave, indeed. About 40 percent of the world's population uses the Web for news, entertainment, communication and myriad other purposes [source: Internet World Stats]. Yet even as more and more people log on, they are actually finding less of the data that's stored online.

The recent news that someone using your computer can see all of your passwords stored in Chrome with a few clicks made me aware of something that I had known -- but ignored -- for a long time: I have five or six passwords for dozens of accounts. ...

This article gives a method for generating secure yet easy to remember passwords for online accounts, using encryption and modular arithmetic (!). It is an interesting use of encryption in everyday life for something we all have, password-protected internet accounts. If you click through to the computer science category, you can find other posts on cryptography, encryption, and privacy.

1. Don't download free media. 2. Don't overshare personal information on social media accounts. 3. Change passwords regularly. 4. Be cautious on public networks and computers.

Even when college students use computer or electronic devices that belong to the school, any websites they visit, links they download, and videos they watch can offer behavioral information and data that is directly tied to that student's profile, and thus them too. It's important to be aware of this fact, and realize that whatever privacy you think that Mac in the back of the library offers you is in reality nonexistent. That Mac is uploading your data to the Cloud every minute you use it, and it's important to track and understand that your online information is being sent, without your consent, to other entities. So, be careful with what you search up next time.