Group items tagged

This blog is all about privacy, as the title suggests. The majority of the blog posts use actual examples, such as the Ashley Madison hack, in order to reveal important cybersecurity lessons. One particular blog post explains how Passages, a secure virtual browser, is a lot like hand sanitizer for the web. I thought that this blog was particularly interesting because it had a lot of relevant, unique examples about privacy and cryptography in the modern world.

A summary of why encryption wouldn't have prevented General Petraeus from getting caught. Like the quote: "If you think cryptography is the solution to your problem, you either don't understand cryptography or you don't understand your problem."

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.

This makes me wonder how ethical it is for the NSA to be so heavily involved in cryptography internationally. Are they building a backdoor into these crytographic systems? If so, how ethical could that be?

This resource provides access to articles, news, and blog posts regarding military embedded systems, often using cryptography. One article referenced the cryptography used to secure "Data at Rest" and the length at which this information should be held secure. Is it ethical to keep this information from the public when safety is no longer a concern? At what point should these well-kept secrets become accessible?

This blog has information about military cryptography and privacy in general, including this post about the Zimmermann Telegram. Is it ethical to lie to an ally if it is in their best interest? What are the ethics behind spying on one's allies? Do ethics hinder one's ability to win a war, and if so, should ethics be disregarded in times of war? Another interesting post examines how Snowden should be viewed as a patriot, not a traitor. This made me question where one's loyalty should remain- to the government or to the people?

My short list of people to follow on Twitter who tweet about cryptography, security, and privacy.

To any future college students: Be careful of what you type on the internet or reveal about yourself in an online forum. Despite the shocking revelations of the size and scope of the government's surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden, the majority of Americans don't understand the kind of information the government has on them, have taken few steps to protect their online data, and believe that such programs don't go far enough in tackling terrorism. Ironically, these same Americans also overwhelmingly believe that consumers have lost protection of their data to companies who have used their clients' privacy as a commodity. I would advise you to be careful of what you post online, and follow a few steps, such as passwords, encryption, and clearing your cookies, to help protect at least some of your data online and allow you to remain private. These programs continue to this day, and it's important that you protect what little privacy remains.

What are the mechanisms behind surveillance? How precisely are people surveilled in the US?

A blog, by multiple authors, about new results in elliptic curve cryptography.

This blog contains vast amounts of information dealing with military cryptography, both in the past and the present. One of the recent articles discussed the morality of utilizing military level cryptography to ensure complete surveillance of civilians, and whether or not it should be allowed.

A security blog created by a multinational software company.

Here's a podcast interview with Bill Binney and Ladar Levison, both featured in Citizenfour. Binney was the former NSA crypto expert we saw testifying in the film a couple of times, and Levison was the guy who ran the secure email service Lavabit that he felt compelled to shut down.

A pre-WWII NSA document on advanced military cryptography which was declassified in 2014. This leads to the question of what impact disclosing these military secrets has on encryption and decryption of messages in future wars, and also why were these documents released in the first place.

This article, combined with the guide to staying completely anonymous on the internet linked at the end of it, suggest that one of the easiest ways to be anonymous online is to use a private browser like Ghostery, or a private search engine like DuckDuckGo. These services don't track your information the same way that Google does, making your online browsing experience more private and secure.

Recently China blocked the Facebook app "Whatsapp," and I find this interesting because by the decision of their government, they can decide your intake of content from the outside world and where to cut it off. Some parts of this relate to Cryptography because people have become very creative in getting around firewalls and accessing blocked sites anyways.