Property Analysis of XOR-Based Visual Cryptography | IEEE | IEEE projects 2014
A (k,n) visual cryptographic scheme (VCS) encodes a secret image into n shadow images (printed on transparencies) distributed among n participants. When any ...

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Security advisories for OpenSSL should not be used for competitive advantage, according to the development project behind the widely used cryptography component.

The warning comes from the OpenSSL Project, which has published for the first time guidelines for how it internally handles security problems, part of an ongoing effort to strengthen the project following the Heartbleed security scare in April.

High severity issues such as remote code execution vulnerabilities will be kept private within OpenSSLs development team, ideally for no longer than a month until a new release is ready.

If an update is planned, a notification will be released on the openssl-announce email list, but no further information about the issues will be given, it said.

Some organizations that develop a general purpose OS that includes OpenSSL will be prenotified with more details about the patches in order to have a few days to prepare. But the OpenSSL Project warned that the more people that are notified in advance, the higher the likelihood that a leak will occur.

We may withdraw notifying individual organizations from future prenotifications if they leak issues before they are public or over time do not add value (value can be added by providing feedback, corrections, test results, etc.), it wrote.

If information on a vulnerability leaks, it makes it more likely that attackers may be able to figure out the software flaw and launch attacks before software products are patched.

The OpenSSL Project also advised that it is not acceptable for organizations to use advance notice in marketing as a competitive advantage. It objects, for example, to marketing claims such as if you had bought our product/used our service you would have been protected a week ago.

OpenSSL has been undergoing an intense code review since the Heartbleed vulnerability was discovered in April. The flaw affected tens of thousands of websites across the Internet and many software applications.

OpenSSL is a cryptographic library that enables SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) or TLS (Transport Security Layer) encryption. Most websites use either SSL or TLS, which is indicated in browsers with a padlock symbol.

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OpenSSL warns vendors against using vulnerability info for marketing

Reddits r/bitcoin is a popular forum where BTC enthusiasts shared news links and anti-establishment jokes. The site was so influential among the community that a recent book about Bitcoin calledThe Anatomy of a Money-like Informational Commodity discussed the viability of using the number of registered members of the forum as a way to gauge the market sentiment.

One of the most upvoted post on the channel yesterday is one entitled Worst Night of My Life, in which a Bitociner recounted how his family responded after they discovered that his parents house broken into with the safe stolen by the burglars.

The thieves simply threw a rock through his (the authors fathers) back sliding glass window, rummaged around in the house until they found the safe and dom hemingwayd it right off of the foundation it was bolted onto. Inside of his safe was an uncommonly large number of bitcoins (he is an early adopter) on a non password protected paper wallet.

For the uninitiated, a paper wallet is an offline mechanism for storing bitcoins. Unlike online wallets, sometimes referred to hot wallets, paper wallet is a form of cold storage, which is deemed immune to hacking, the cause of most of Bitcoin heists so far. However, despite being considered one of the safest ways to store bitcoins, paper wallet is far from foolproof.

Although the family had backed up the paper wallets and safe-kept them in the local bank, because the burglary took place at night, they had to wait until the next day before they could retrieve their backups and transfer the coins away. The author didnt reveal the specific amount, but he suggested that the amount was significant enough, saying that his father was an early adopter. They were so anxious that they stayed up the entire night.

The robbers had 9 hours to crack into it, figure out what the hell they were looking at (assuming he wasnt explicitly targeted) and then transfer the bitcoins off into their own address. We were both sweating bullets and did not sleep at all.

Fortunately, the thieves were neither aware of or tech-savvy enough to figure out what they laid their hands on. In the end, crisis averted and life back to normal. Am I then only one that saw the irony?

With Bitcoin, you can be your own bank this is many Bitcoiners belief as well as one of the central value propositions of Bitcoin as a currency. It carries two layers of meanings. First, Bitcoin allows people to transmit value among each other without involving a centralized authority and from any places in the world irrespective of jurisdictions and geographies; second, Bitcoin is supposed to allow people to store it secure enough so they never needed to go to a bank. This gives rise to the rather fanatic-sounding prediction of death of traditional banks. Now, it appears that banks offered Bitcoin a measure of security that they cannot get from anywhere else.

It is not only individual users, Coinbase, one of the most reputed Bitcoin companies, also used banks for the same purpose. According to the company: we can safely move about 90% of those funds offline. We do this by taking the sensitive data that would normally reside on our servers (the private keys which represent the actual bitcoins) and moving it to USB sticks and paper backups. We then take these to a safe deposit box at an actual bank.

Despite the cryptography that Bitcoin is based on, there are more ways than you can imagine to breach its security. It is vulnerable to hacking, as indicated by many heists indicated; more importantly, it is vulnerable to human foibles if you are the kind of people who often feel the need to reset your passwords, then you are most likely to find Bitcoin security challenging. In the world of Bitcoin, private key is the only link between you and your money. Unlike losing your bankcard, there is no authority to go to after you lose it Bitcoin is made for the most individualistic and fastidious with a determination of self-reliance. Failing that, you will have to settle with online wallet service, which are centralized and necessitates a certain degree of trust from you. But dont think that is the only risk. Lack of legal recognition means loss of bitcoin doesnt receive the same level of legal protection as other properties do. A thief can kidnap and torture for the private keys. Even in a world there were no such hideous crime, an almost insurmountable obstacle that would prevent Bitcoin from being adopted by the majority is that most of us are just not organized enough.

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Bitcoin, The Cryptography-based Currency Continues To Rely On Banks For Security

By Jessie Molloy Correspondent September 4, 2014 6:36PM

Thomas Simmons | Supplied photo

storyidforme: 71493539 tmspicid: 25134578 fileheaderid: 12677504

Updated: September 4, 2014 8:21PM

While most college students put their studies on hold when they get a summer job, Illinois Wesleyan University student Tom Simmons was able to continue his academic pursuits and get paid this summer when he became a part of the Eckley Summer Scholar and Artist Program.

An Evergreen Park native, Simmons, is a computer science major entering his senior year at Wesleyan with a special interest in online cryptography, which is used for securing information on the Internet.

Cryptography is all around us, he said. Every time we secure our communications, use online banking, check our email or buy something from Amazon we are using cryptography.

Originally drawn to computer science in high school by the idea of coding and game design, Simmons became interested in cryptography when he got to college and found books on the subject in the school library.

My sophomore year I found out my professor was doing research on the subject, and I approached him about it, Simmons said. He told me about his work, and I started to help him as a research assistant.

While he also works as a teaching assistant in the computer science program during the school year, his research with assistant math professor Andrew Shallue has continued independently of Simmons class work. It was Shallue who recommended that Simmons apply for the Eckley scholarship and who served as his summer mentor.

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Student benefits from special summer program

17 hours ago by James E. Rickman This small device developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory uses the truly random spin of light particles as defined by laws of quantum mechanics to generate a random number for use in a cryptographic key that can be used to securely transmit information between two parties. Quantum key distribution represents a foolproof cryptography method that may now become available to the general public, thanks to a licensing agreement between Los Alamos and Whitewood Encryption Systems, LLC. Los Alamos scientist developed their particular method for quantum cryptography after two decades of rigorous testing inside of the nation's premier national security science laboratory.

The largest information technology agreement ever signed by Los Alamos National Laboratory brings the potential for truly secure data encryption to the marketplace after nearly 20 years of development at the nation's premier national-security science laboratory.

"Quantum systems represent the best hope for truly secure data encryption because they store or transmit information in ways that are unbreakable by conventional cryptographic methods," said Duncan McBranch, Chief Technology Officer at Los Alamos National Laboratory. "This licensing agreement with Whitewood Encryption Systems, Inc. is historic in that it takes our groundbreaking technical work that was developed over two decades into commercial encryption applications."

By harnessing the quantum properties of light for generating random numbers, and creating cryptographic keys with lightning speed, the technology enables a completely new commercial platform for real-time encryption at high data rates. For the first time, ordinary citizens and companies will be able to use cryptographic systems that have only been the subject of experiments in the world's most advanced physics and computing laboratories for real-world applications.

If implemented on a wide scale, quantum key distribution technology could ensure truly secure commerce, banking, communications and data transfer.

The technology at the heart of the agreement is a compact random-number-generation technology that creates cryptographic keys based on the truly random polarization state of light particles known as photons. Because the randomness of photon polarization is based on quantum mechanics, an adversary cannot predict the outcome of this random number generator. This represents a vast improvement over current "random-number" generators that are based on mathematical formulas that can be broken by a computer with sufficient speed and power.

Moreover, any attempt by a third party to eavesdrop on the secure communications between quantum key holders disrupts the quantum system itself, so communication can be aborted and the snooper detected before any data is stolen.

The Los Alamos technology is simple and compact enough that it could be made into a unit comparable to a computer thumb drive or compact data-card reader. Units could be manufactured at extremely low cost, putting them within easy retail range of ordinary electronics consumers.

Whitewood Encryption Systems, Inc. of Boston, Mass., is a wholly owned subsidiary of Allied Minds. The agreement provides exclusive license for several Los Alamos-created quantum-encryption patents in exchange for consideration in the form of licensing fees.

"Whitewood aims to address one of the most difficult problems in securing modern communications: scalabilitymeeting the need for low-cost, low-latency, high-security systems that can effectively service increasingly complex data security needs," said John Serafini, Vice President at Allied Minds. "Whitewood's foundation in quantum mechanics makes it uniquely suited to satisfy demand for the encryption of data both at rest as well as in transit, and in the mass quantity and high-throughput requirements of today's digital environment."

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Quantum key distribution technology: Secure computing for the 'Everyman'

A Real Time Approach for Secure Text Transmission Using Video Cryptography
A Real Time Approach for Secure Text Transmission Using Video Cryptography.

By: Krishnan Bala

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A Real Time Approach for Secure Text Transmission Using Video Cryptography - Video

What would happen to you if you went back in time and killed your grandfather? A model using photons reveals that quantum mechanics can solve the quandaryand even foil quantum cryptography

Entering a closed timelike curve tomorrow means you could end up at today. Credit:Dmitry Schidlovsky

On June 28, 2009, the world-famous physicist Stephen Hawking threw a party at the University of Cambridge, complete with balloons, hors d'oeuvres and iced champagne. Everyone was invited but no one showed up. Hawking had expected as much, because he only sent out invitations after his party had concluded. It was, he said, "a welcome reception for future time travelers," a tongue-in-cheek experiment to reinforce his 1992 conjecture that travel into the past is effectively impossible.

But Hawking may be on the wrong side of history. Recent experiments offer tentative support for time travel's feasibilityat least from a mathematical perspective. The study cuts to the core of our understanding of the universe, and the resolution of the possibility of time travel, far from being a topic worthy only of science fiction, would have profound implications for fundamental physics as well as for practical applications such as quantum cryptography and computing.

Closed timelike curves The source of time travel speculation lies in the fact that our best physical theories seem to contain no prohibitions on traveling backward through time. The feat should be possible based on Einstein's theory of general relativity, which describes gravity as the warping of spacetime by energy and matter. An extremely powerful gravitational field, such as that produced by a spinning black hole, could in principle profoundly warp the fabric of existence so that spacetime bends back on itself. This would create a "closed timelike curve," or CTC, a loop that could be traversed to travel back in time.

Hawking and many other physicists find CTCs abhorrent, because any macroscopic object traveling through one would inevitably create paradoxes where cause and effect break down. In a model proposed by the theorist David Deutsch in 1991, however, the paradoxes created by CTCs could be avoided at the quantum scale because of the behavior of fundamental particles, which follow only the fuzzy rules of probability rather than strict determinism. "It's intriguing that you've got general relativity predicting these paradoxes, but then you consider them in quantum mechanical terms and the paradoxes go away," says University of Queensland physicist Tim Ralph. "It makes you wonder whether this is important in terms of formulating a theory that unifies general relativity with quantum mechanics."

Experimenting with a curve Recently Ralph and his PhD student Martin Ringbauer led a team that experimentally simulated Deutsch's model of CTCs for the very first time, testing and confirming many aspects of the two-decades-old theory. Their findings are published in Nature Communications. Much of their simulation revolved around investigating how Deutsch's model deals with the grandfather paradox, a hypothetical scenario in which someone uses a CTC to travel back through time to murder her own grandfather, thus preventing her own later birth. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)

Deutsch's quantum solution to the grandfather paradox works something like this:

Instead of a human being traversing a CTC to kill her ancestor, imagine that a fundamental particle goes back in time to flip a switch on the particle-generating machine that created it. If the particle flips the switch, the machine emits a particlethe particleback into the CTC; if the switch isn't flipped, the machine emits nothing. In this scenario there is no a priori deterministic certainty to the particle's emission, only a distribution of probabilities. Deutsch's insight was to postulate self-consistency in the quantum realm, to insist that any particle entering one end of a CTC must emerge at the other end with identical properties. Therefore, a particle emitted by the machine with a probability of one half would enter the CTC and come out the other end to flip the switch with a probability of one half, imbuing itself at birth with a probability of one half of going back to flip the switch. If the particle were a person, she would be born with a one-half probability of killing her grandfather, giving her grandfather a one-half probability of escaping death at her handsgood enough in probabilistic terms to close the causative loop and escape the paradox. Strange though it may be, this solution is in keeping with the known laws of quantum mechanics.

In their new simulation Ralph, Ringbauer and their colleagues studied Deutsch's model using interactions between pairs of polarized photons within a quantum system that they argue is mathematically equivalent to a single photon traversing a CTC. "We encode their polarization so that the second one acts as kind of a past incarnation of the first, Ringbauer says. So instead of sending a person through a time loop, they created a stunt double of the person and ran him through a time-loop simulator to see if the doppelganger emerging from a CTC exactly resembled the original person as he was in that moment in the past.

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Time Travel Simulation Resolves “Grandfather Paradox”

Thieves steal data constantly, so protecting it is an ongoing challenge. There are more than 6,000 banks with 80,000 branches in the United States, nearly 6,000 hospitals and thousands of insurance companies, all with data that we want to be kept private. Traditionally, their valued data is protected by keys, which are transmitted between sender and receiver. These secret keys are protected by unproven mathematical assumptions and can be intercepted, corrupted and exposed if a hacker eavesdrops on these keys during transmission. Specific problems with current encryption technology include:

Standard methods for exchanging cryptographic keys are in jeopardy. RSA-1024, once commonly used to exchange keys between browsers and web servers, has probably been broken; its no longer regarded as safe by NIST, though RSA-2048 is still approved. This and other public-key infrastructure technologies perhaps havent been broken yet but soon will be by bigger, faster computers. And once quantum computers are mainstream, data encrypted using existing key exchange technologies will become even more vulnerable.

Researchers are working on methods to improve the security of software-based key exchange methods using what is known aspost-quantum cryptography methods that will continue to be effective after quantum computers are powerful enough to break existing key exchange methods. These are all based on the unprovable assertion that certain numerical algorithms are difficult to reverse. But the question that remains is difficult for whom? How do we know that an unpublished solution to these exact problems hasnt been discovered? The answer is we dont.

Quantum cryptography is the only known method for transmitting a secret key over long distances that is provably secure in accordance with the well-accepted and many-times-verified laws that govern quantum physics. It works by using photons of light to physically transfer a shared secret between two entities. While these photons might be intercepted by an eavesdropper, they cant be copied, or at least, cant be perfectly copied (cloned). By comparing measurements of the properties of a fraction of these photons, its possible to show that no eavesdropper is listening in and that the keys are thus safe to use; this is what we mean by provably secure. Though called quantum cryptography, we are actually only exchanging encryption keys, so researchers prefer the term quantum key distribution, or QKD, to describe this process.The no-cloning theorem is one of the fundamental principles behind QKD, and why we think that this technology will become a cornerstone of network security for high value data.

While products based on QKD already are being used by banks and governments in Europe especially Switzerland they have not been deployed commercially in the United States to any great extent. Current technological breakthroughs are pushing the distance over which quantum signals can be sent.Trials using laboratory-grade hardware and dark fibers optical fibers laid down by telecommunications companies but lying unused have sent quantum signals three hundred kilometers, but practical systems are currently limited to distances of about 100 kilometers. A scalable architecture that includes a Trusted Node to bridge the gap between successive QKD systems can both extend the practical range of this technology and allow keys to be securely shared over a wide ranging network, making large scale implementation possible and practical. Cybersecurity is making progress toward the future reality of sending data securely over long distances using quantum physics.

As an example, my team at Battelle, together with ID Quantique, has started to design and build the hardware required to complete a 650-kilometre link between Battelles headquarters and our offices in Washington DC. We are also planning a network linking major U.S. cities, which could exceed 10,000 kilometers and are currently evaluating partners to work with us on this effort. For the past year, we have used QKD to protect the networks at our Columbus, Ohio headquarters. But were not alone when it comes to quantum-communication efforts. Last month, China started installing the worlds longest quantum-communications network, which includes a 2,000-kilometre link between Beijing and Shanghai.

Many nations acknowledge that zeroing in on un-hackable data security is a must, knowing that even the best standard encryption thats considered unbreakable today will be vulnerable at some point in the future likely the near future. QKD is the best technically feasible means of generating secure encryption. Yes, it has its challenges, but continued innovation is tackling these issues and bringing us closer to the reality of long-distance quantum rollouts and truly secure and future-proofed network technology.

Does this mean that software-based methods wont have any value for network security applications? Of course not. One must always evaluate the cost of the protection against the cost associated with the loss of your data. But part of that evaluation must include the certainty of the security solution. So, while post-quantum cryptography and QKD may both be secure enough for a particular application, we use QKD when we want to know that our data is secure, without having to rely on unproven assumptions that it is.

In the long run, we envision an integrated network that includes software-based methods, which we call Tier III (cost conscious), alongside higher-security and commercially viable QKD (Tier II) solutions that use quantum methods with Trusted Nodes to distribute keys, but conventional encryption (AES, for example) to protect actual data. In this vision, there is also one higher level Tier I (very secure, very expensive) that uses quantum repeaters to transmit long, quantum-based keys and one-time-pad encryption to protect our highest value data, mostly government and military information.

QKD is an attractive solution for companies and organizations that have very high-value data. If you have data that you want to protect for years, QKD makes a lot sense. I think youll see this distributed across the country to protect that high-value, long-duration data. This is the future.

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The Future of Security: Zeroing In On Un-Hackable Data With Quantum Key Distribution

Cryptography is a method of storing and transmitting data in a particular form so that only those for whom it is intended can read and process it.

Cryptography is closely related to the disciplines of cryptology and cryptanalysis. Cryptography includes techniques such as microdots, merging words with images, and other ways to hide information in storage or transit. However, in today's computer-centric world, cryptography is most often associated with scrambling plaintext (ordinary text, sometimes referred to as cleartext) into ciphertext (a process called encryption), then back again (known as decryption). Individuals who practice this field are known as cryptographers.

Modern cryptography concerns itself with the following four objectives:

1) Confidentiality (the information cannot be understood by anyone for whom it was unintended)

2) Integrity (the information cannot be altered in storage or transit between sender and intended receiver without the alteration being detected)

3) Non-repudiation (the creator/sender of the information cannot deny at a later stage his or her intentions in the creation or transmission of the information)

4) Authentication (the sender and receiver can confirm each other?s identity and the origin/destination of the information)

Procedures and protocols that meet some or all of the above criteria are known as cryptosystems. Cryptosystems are often thought to refer only to mathematical procedures and computer programs; however, they also include the regulation of human behavior, such as choosing hard-to-guess passwords, logging off unused systems, and not discussing sensitive procedures with outsiders.

The word is derived from the Greek kryptos, meaning hidden. The origin of cryptography is usually dated from about 2000 BC, with the Egyptian practice of hieroglyphics. These consisted of complex pictograms, the full meaning of which was only known to an elite few. The first known use of a modern cipher was by Julius Caesar (100 BC to 44 BC), who did not trust his messengers when communicating with his governors and officers. For this reason, he created a system in which each character in his messages was replaced by a character three positions ahead of it in the Roman alphabet.

In recent times, cryptography has turned into a battleground of some of the world's best mathematicians and computer scientists. The ability to securely store and transfer sensitive information has proved a critical factor in success in war and business.

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What is cryptography? - Definition from WhatIs.com

How to Convert a Positive Integer in Modular Arithmetic - Cryptography - Lesson 3
In this video, I explain how to convert a positive integer to a congruent integer within a given modulo. Donate - http://bit.ly/19AHMvX.

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How to Convert a Positive Integer in Modular Arithmetic - Cryptography - Lesson 3 - Video