eli5
I thought this would be interesting to share. I'm not aware of the legalities of this in countries other than the US and will need to confirm the same with my lawyer friends. Nevertheless, I found it to be very clever when I first encountered it. So canaries
cryptography
Let's start with some basics. Just like when you want to talk to another person, you talk in a language that both of you understand, every system that wants to talk to another system needs to talk in a commonly understood language. Technically, we call it a protocol.
cryptography
Suppose you have a database full of confidential information such as emails of users. As a responsible sysadmin, you'd not let such data exist in plaintext in your systems and therefore you decide to encrypt everything. But now, the application needs a searching functionality where users can see
cryptography
Most block ciphers work on the bytes and bits of data. It doesn't matter to them if the data is a video, a phone number, a credit card number or a meme of Patrick Star. And that's good. It means that a generic block cipher can
cryptography
We've heard that AES and other block ciphers require specific key sizes; 128, 256 and 512 bits. But I don't ever remember having to calculate my password length based on the underlying key size. Never have I read on a website "passwords need to be
cryptography
You need some urgent cash to buy today's lunch. You throw a paper chit at your colleague, "Hey, I need you to transfer 100 bucks in my account number 10022, urgent". Eve, a bad actor in your office, intercepts the chit, changes the 10022 to 10033,
cryptography
The core goals of cryptography and any application of cryptography are confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity. Let's begin with a short one liner on each: * Confidentiality: No one should be able to read the contents of the message except the intended recipient. * Integrity: No one should be able to
cryptography
In my previous post, which was a review of the book Applied Cryptography and Cryptography Engineering, I wrote that DES, in spite of retiring officially (after numerous successful attacks), is still a great algorithm from an academic perspective to learn and peek into the minds of cryptographers. In this one,