Root Privileges

Tag: cryptography

  • Making sense of quantum annealing

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    One of the tougher things about writing and reading about quantum mechanics is keeping up with how the meaning of some words change as they graduate from being used in the realm of classical mechanics – where things are what they look like – to that of the quantum – where we have no idea…

  • New National Encryption Policy doesn’t seem to like encryption

    New National Encryption Policy doesn’t seem to like encryption

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    A new draft National Encryption Policy put out by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology seeks to define the various encryption standards allowable on data originating from the country, and does so in its traditional ham-handed way. In an abridged version of the document, put out by DEITY, the department proposes some practices that effectively…

  • Two of Alan Turing’s WW-II papers are now in the public domain

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    The Wire May 21, 2015 A scientific paper written by Alan Turing, the brilliant computer scientist who cracked the Enigma code during the Second World War and bolstered Britain’s war efforts, was recently declassified by the British government and uploaded to the arXiv pre-print server. The paper’s entitled ‘The Applications of Probability to Cryptography’. It has Turing…

  • The federation of our digital identities

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    Facebook, Twitter, email, WordPress, Instagram, online banking, the list goes on… Offline, you’re one person maintaining (presumably) one identity. On the web, you have many of them. All of them might point at you, but they’re still distinct packets of data floating through different websites. Within each site, your identity is unified, but between them, you’re different people.…

  • Inspecting nuclear warheads like they were passwords

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    Nuclear weapon inspectors have a weighty but tricky job. An inspecting state relies on them to verify if a weapon is a nuclear warhead, but the state whose weapons are being inspected doesn’t want to divulge too much information about the weapon’s design or performance. As David Cliff, a researcher at the Verification Research, Training and Information Center,…

  • Trying to understand bitcoins

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    In a 2008 paper, a Japanese programmer, Satoshi Nakamoto, introduced an alternate form of currency that he called bitcoins. His justifications were the problems plaguing contemporary digital commerce. In Nakamoto’s words: “Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction…