Tag Archives: cryptography

Making sense of quantum annealing

Posted on September 5, 2017 by

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged cryptography, D-Wave 2000Q, encryption, metaheuristic, metastable, potential wells, quantum annealing, quantum computing, quantum tunnelling, semantics, Shor's algorithm | Comments Off

New National Encryption Policy doesn’t seem to like encryption

Posted on September 21, 2015 by

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged cryptography, Department of Electronics and Information Technology, encryption standards, SSL | Comments Off

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

Posted on May 21, 2015 by

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Alan Turing, cryptography, Enigma code, scientific literature | Comments Off

The federation of our digital identities

Posted on July 5, 2014 by

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged anonymity, bitcoins, blockchain, Crypto-Book, cryptocurrency, cryptography, digital identity, Facebook, federated identity, namecoins, OAuth, online privacy, OpenID | Comments Off

Inspecting nuclear warheads like they were passwords

Posted on June 30, 2014 by

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged British Test Object, cryptography, neutrons, nuclear warheads, weapons inspection, zero-knowledge protocol | Comments Off

Trying to understand bitcoins

Posted on May 31, 2013 by

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged application-specific integrated circuits, bitcoins, crypto-currencies, cryptography, field-programmable gate arrays, internet commerce, SHA-256 | Comments Off