Math 1111: Cryptography

Interesting to read a little more about the history of the Vigenere Cipher. Also explains how it is cracked.

This website gives a good description about the Vigenère cipher and techniques for cracking it. It also shows another way we could more easily crack one of these ciphers using Microsoft Excel. Lastly, on the menu on the left side of the page is a link that lets you contact Simon Singh.

Many interesting ones in this list. I like the Kryptos at the CIA headquarters. 

Here's a list of 10 unsolved cipher texts throughout history, #2 is the Beale Papers covered in the chapter, #8 is Kryptos (the background of our website). Some date back as far as 1400 BC and some are more recent like the Zodiac Killer.

Here's the Prezi I shared today on the Vigenere cipher.

It's time to start bookmarking Charles Babbage weirdness.

This article opened my eyes to many things, such as how many cookies can be stored on your computer from not going to many websites, how easy it is to track ones location, and how Facebook could easily recognize you in real life. It discussed ways that information is gathered and stored about someone online that I hadn't even thought of before and was very eye-opening.

Facebook already knew you would feel that way about this news.

This article is about a smartphone that's designed specifically to help you keep your personal information secure--it lets you easily encrypt your calls and texts and search the internet privately. There's also a video about ways to encrypt your email.

Nice find. I'm reminded of DuckDuckGo, https://duckduckgo.com/, the search engine that doesn't track you. At all.

These people were prompted to create a easy, secure email service. They incorporated in Switzerland as it has much more stringent privacy laws than we have in America.

Great find! At some point this semester, we're all going to learn how to use encrypted email. We might try out a few different systems, including ProtonMail, and compare them.

What really stood out to me about this article was that they said the NSA actually pays more attention to those people who use encryption. So, in order to protect ourselves and also avoid prying NSA eyes, we should encourage people to stand in solidarity with encryption. I thought this was really interesting because I always thought that encryption would undoubtedly make everything more secure, but here they're saying that it actually attracts attention (which isn't necessarily a good thing).

When I was a kid, I read an issue of Superman in which he faces Batman's villain, the Joker. At one point, the Joker tells Superman that he's kidnapped all of Superman's best friends (Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, and so on) and locked them inside lead-lined caskets, hidden throughout Metropolis. Since the caskets are air-tight, they only have an hour to live, and Superman can't find them because his x-ray vision can't see through lead! That's what the Joker said. Actually, since Superman can't see through lead, those caskets *stood out* when he scanned the city with his x-ray vision, and he rescued all his friends in short order. Same basic idea.

You can find anything on the Internet: http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/superjoker6.jpg.

This doesn't quite follow the guidelines of the blogging assignment, I don't think, but I found it pretty interesting, so I'll share this one too. This is basically about the people who are going to be holding the keys to the building blocks of the internet. I'm not sure I understand it completely, but it sounds fascinating!

Excellent find! I heard about this security system when the author of this piece, James Ball, was interviewed for the "On the Media" podcast: http://www.onthemedia.org/story/so-many-keys/. Great stuff.

This is a nice intro to public-key cryptography, and a bit of the math behind the "classic" public-key algorithms.

Gives you tools to make sure your information is safe.

One word of caution: This piece is from 2012, before we learned what the NSA was up to. It's quite possible that some of these mechanisms are now known to be insecure.

I found this article interesting because it actually mentions the "firesheep" add-on we discussed during class as well as the encryption of our data.

Good find. It's important to note that this piece is from 2011, shortly after the Firesheep controversy. As far as I can tell, HTTPS use is now mandatory, at least on Facebook.com. I don't know about the Facebook app, however. That might be something to look into.

Interesting that ~35% of 1000 surveyed have upped the strength of their passwords, but only 6% turned on two-factor ID, which was a major cause of the iCloud hacks going undetected for so long.

It seems that two-factor authentication would not have prevented those iCloud hacks (according to this piece: http://www.tuaw.com/2014/09/02/think-iclouds-two-factor-authentication-protects-your-privacy/), but since Apple has now changed the triggers for two-factor to include things like iCloud access, two-factor will be more helpful going forward. So it is a little surprising that more people haven't enabled it.

I'm also reminded of the ACLU's Chris Soghoian's point (https://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/lessons-celebrity-icloud-photo-breach) that one reason people have crappy Apple passwords is that Apple makes you use your password so darn often. I know I get frustrated when I have to enter my (crazy long) Apple password on my iPhone just to download a free app.

With the shutdown of the silk road, the NSA has proven that it is monitoring even the most anonymous parts of the web. This raises some serious questions. Is anything that we do online really "private?"

It's a little depressing, isn't it? One solution would be stronger oversight for the NSA. We could assume they can see everything, but have stronger assurances that they're using that power responsibly.

A more user-friendly way to work on monoalphabetic substitution ciphers, includes frequency charts

Although it doesn't directly deal with online privacy, I thought this was really cool. It is a new form of encryption involving sending a beam of two photons with only one of them acting as a "key." It could very well be the new method of securing privacy.

This might be something we look into for our class project on practical cryptography later in the semester.

Some advice from security expert Bruce Schneier on how to keep the NSA from snooping on you. "Trust the math. Encryption if your friend."