Welcome: Fall 2008

Hi everyone. Welcome to TELCOM 2820/INFSCI 2170: Cryptography. For ease of use, I will refer to this course simply as TELCOM 2820. The first class is on Tuesday, August 27th, 2008 at 3.00 p.m. in Room IS 406. This blog will be used to point you to articles and news items of interest to this course. Please use an RSS aggregator/news reader (such as Netnewswire Lite) for notification of updates and/or check this page regularly. Please look at previous posts to this blog. Some of the articles are still relevant.

As you may notice, there have been few posts since 2006. I encourage students to send me articles of interest which I can post for others to see.

Welcome: Fall 2006

Hi everyone. Welcome to TELCOM 2820/INFSCI 2170: Cryptography. For ease of use, I will refer to this course simply as TELCOM 2820. The first class is on Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 at 3.00 p.m. in Room IS 404. This blog will be used to point you to articles and news items of interest to this course. Please use an RSS aggregator/news reader (such as Netnewswire Lite) for notification of updates and/or check this page regularly. Please look at previous posts to this blog. Some of the articles are still relevant.

Cracking WEP/WPA

This webpage (more a wiki) was Furled by 18 members today. For those not familiar with Furl, Furl.net is a site similar to del.icio.us - a social bookmarking site. The webpage in question provides detailed instructions on how to crack WEP using Aircrack, Kismet and a few other tools. Please do not abuse this information. This posting is for education purposes only.

Zfone from Zimmermann

The man who created PGP is back with Zfone, a software tool for encryption Voice over IP (VoIP) conversations. The New York Times today has an article about how this may affect phone tapping - you need to register with New York Times to access the article. Here is a link to Zimmermann's page.

TELCOM 2820 in Fall 2006

TELCOM 2820/INFSCI 2170: Cryptography will be taught in Fall 2006 on Tuesdays from 3.00 - 5.50 p.m. The web page for this course is here. You can take this course if you are willing to do some algebra (no calculus here), you are familiar with the modulo operation and XOR, and can do C/Java/C# programming. Cryptography is required for a security certification from the school.

Identification and Two-factor Authentication

Here are the recent new items and articles related to this topic.

1. Bruce Schneier's blog.
2. The PDF of Bruce Schneier's article in the Communications of the ACM.
3. Report on a safer ID scheme in Microsoft's next OS version.
4. Face-off in Network World Fusion.

Crypto-gram

Cryptogram is a free newsletter that is written monthly by Bruce Schneier, well known security expert and author of Applied Cryptography. In the March 15th, 2005 issue, the newsletter talks about SHA-1 being broken and also has an essay on two-factor authentication. You can find cryptogram here and also subscribe to it if you wish. There is also an opinion piece by the same author in ComputerWorld about how successful cryptanalysis of popular hash functions like MD5 and SHA imply that there is now need for a new standard to replace them.

Tutorial on Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Certicom has an online tutorial on Elliptic Curve Cryptography with a Java applet showing how the shape and nature of an elliptic curve changes. You can find the tutorial here.

Primality Testing

Here is an article about how a group of researchers in India have discovered a quick and accurate way of determining whether or not a number is prime. The article is dated October 2002. At the end of this article are references to the original paper that is available here.