RSA 2017 and Google: Celebrating Cryptography

I had the pleasure of dining with a tableful of cryptographersthe true guests of honorat the RSA security conference in San Francisco last week.

As we noshed gnocchi at the Four Season's Hotel, I learned about the group's work. One researcher, Liron David, a PhD student at Tel-Aviv University, described an improved technique for recovering cryptographic keys from so-called side channel attacks. These attacks entail using weaknesses in the physical implementation of a system (like the sound, heat, and electromagnetic energy emitted by a whirring hard drive), as opposed to algorithmic flaws (like a faulty random number generator), for decipherment. Her method involved complex mathematics (which I will not attempt to muck up in the space allotted here).

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Another researcher, Peter Scholl, a cryptographer at the University of Bristol, detailed his work on "oblivious transfer." First developed in 1981, this privacy-protective mechanism allows one party, like a person or computer server, to relay information to another party without knowing exactly what has been sent. Imagine looking up a contacts phone number through a messaging service, like WhatsApp for example, without the company behind it (in this case Facebook ( fb ) ) knowing which information you sought. That extra privacy might be preferable under certain circumstances, Scholl said.

Cryptography is a vitally important, if opaque, sciencethe basis of our security in an increasingly digital world. A reminder of that arrived Thursday when researchers at Google ( goog ) and a Dutch research institute sounded what they hope to be the final death knell for a decades-old cryptographic algorithm called SHA-1. Suffice it to say that they achieved a featthe first "collision" of data supposedly secured by SHA-1which will have immediate ramifications for the way many businesses operate electronically. (The Wall Street Journal has an excellent summary of the impact here .)

For more on cybersecurity, watch:

Esoteric mathematics make the world hum, and the codebreakers deserve our praise.

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