Cryptography Trends And News Going Into 2020

Quantum Computing

While quantum computing may not be coming quite as fast as some in the field had feared (or perhaps hoped), Google did solve an impressive problem this year.

They published a paper in Nature stating that their quantum processor solved a problem that a digital computer would take 10,000 years to solve. The problem that was solved deals with generating certifiably random numbers. Their processor, ‘Sycamore’, uses 53 qubits, which corresponds to a search space of 1016.

Lattice-Based Cryptography

Lattice-based Cryptography (LBC) is one of our best bets for secure “Post Quantum Cryptography”. Almost half of the second round of NIST’s PQC contest are based on lattice math.

Lattice crypto is often based on the shortest vector problem. A problem where, given a basis of a vector space and a norm, the goal is to find the shortest non-zero vector.

Matthew Dozer has a great introductory video:

Lattice-Based Crypto for IOT (Khalid, McCarthy, O’Neill)

Lattice Based Cryptography – Wikipedia

Bitcoin – Schnorr Signatures

Instead of the current ECDSA implementation, Bitcoin might be switching to Schnorr signatures in order to get more efficiency when signing transactions. Instead of signing each transaction separately, with Schnorr, we can generate a single signature to validate many transactions at once. This allows Bitcoin to scale by requiring less data to be broadcast on the network when grouping transactions.

More Rigorous Testing of Hash Functions

Nicky Mouha published a paper exposing a vulnerability in Apple’s CoreCrypto Library, which affects 11 out of 12 implemented hashes. MD2 is the only function to remain secure. A new test is introduced which can help detect similar problems moving forward

https://www.nist.gov/publications/extending-nists-cavp-testing-cryptographic-hash-function-implementations

Thanks

Lane on Twitter: @wagslane

Lane on Dev.to: wagslane

Download Qvault: https://qvault.io

Star our Github: https://github.com/q-vault/qvault

The post Cryptography Trends And News Going Into 2020 appeared first on Qvault.



source https://qvault.io/2020/01/03/cryptography-trends-and-news-going-into-2020/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=cryptography-trends-and-news-going-into-2020

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why is Exclusive Or (XOR) Important in Cryptography?

Image
If you are getting into cryptography, or just trying to understand the fundamentals, you may have noticed that the exclusive-or operation is used quite often, especially in ciphers. What is XOR ( ⊕ )? XOR, or “exclusive or” operates on binary data. It returns true if both of its inputs are opposites (one false and one true), otherwise, it returns false. An example in go code would be something like: func exclusiveOr(a bool, b bool) bool { return a != b } XOR Cipher – The Perfect Cipher The XOR operation can be used as a simple cipher for encrypting and decrypting messages with a single key. This is known as symmetric encryption. It is interesting to note that if: The key is the same size as the message The key is kept secret and generated truly randomly Then the cipher is impossible to crack. This is known as a one time pad . However, a simple XOR shouldn’t be used in production due to the key length needing to be too long to be practical. Cipher Example A...
Read more

Base64 vs Base58 Encoding

Image
By Lane Wagner –  @wagslane  on Twitter Base64 is one of the most popular encoding formats for representing data. Have some binary data? Base64 encode it for convenient readability and parsing. Base58 is just another encoding format (with 58 characters instead of 64, and has gained popularity largely due to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. When it comes to data encoding, there is typically a trade-off made between: Human Readability: Do humans have a good idea of what is being represented at a glance? Efficient data compression: How many bytes are used to represent the same data? Let’s rank Base58, Base64, and ASCII encoding against each other using these metrics! First: A Note on Binary All data is stored in a raw binary format on computers. These encoding formats (Base64, Base58, and ASCII) are just different ways of reading and writing binary data. For example, in Base64 the binary code 000000 represents the letter A , but in ASCII the binary 00000000 repres...
Read more

(Very) Basic Intro to Hash Functions (SHA-256, MD-5, etc)

Image
This is going to be a basic introduction to hash functions. I will assume most of my audience is here to gain an understanding of why hash functions are used and the basic idea of why they work. My goal is to explain it in a general sense, I will be omitting proofs and implementation details and instead focusing on the high-level principles. Why Use A Hash Function? Hash functions are used all over the internet in order to securely store passwords, find duplicate records, quickly store and retrieve data, and more. For example,  Qvault  uses hashes to extend master passwords into private encryption keys. A longer list of uses here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_function#Uses I want to focus on several important features of hash functions, arguably the most important features. Hash functions scramble data deterministically No matter the input, the output of a hash function always has the same size The original data can not be retrieved from the scrambled d...
Read more