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Cryptoucan™ stage: Pretty Good Privacy

Written by Dominik Joe Pantůček on 2018-10-18

cryptoucan

As you might have noticed, there was a conference in Prague on October 6th. It was a conference about Linux, an open source conference and on such conference, cryptography must have been present. If you know why, you know why you should read on - and if you do not know why, read on to find out what do open source and cryptography have in common.

The conference in question is called LinuxDays[1] and it was my pleasure to host a discussion panel there. The topic was: Where are you heading, cryptography? And although most of the conference was in Czech and the discussion panel was in Czech as well, it is more than appropriate to sum up what we were discussing and why.

Before the actual discussion had started, every panelist introduced himself. Jan Dušátko[2] was the first one to go.

Jan - apart from his passion for cryptography as a whole - does a long time research into symmetric ciphers[3] and their modes. For his introduction, he shared his knowledge about symmetric ciphers and reminded everyone that just using a good symmetric cipher is not enough to achieve required level of confidentiality. Differences between ECB[4], CBC[5], GCM[6] or XTS[7] were discussed and the audience listened carefully without daring to interrupt him. He had definitely proven that he really knows a hell lot about these topics.

Second one was Pavel Vondruška[8] who gave a quite long talk about his work with respect to legislative, standardization and cryptography research. As a lecturer at Charles' University[9] he used more academic approach so sometimes the audience had a hard time following but in the end, he had shown that if for the discussion he is the one to answer questions from these areas.

My turn[10] had come afterwards. After summing up my work for the last five years and a short intermission, I tried to quickly explain the main differences between DLP[11] and ECDLP[12] algebraic problems. It is not for me to judge - yet the audience seemed to nod that Dominik Pantůček is the one to ask if elliptic curves and asymmetric cryptography are involved.

Last one to introduce himself was Libor Dostálek[13]. His talk about TLS inspection in corporate networks, on-the-fly certificate signing and risks of anonymous TLS assured everyone that he truly is an expert on this topic. Actually he is quite versatile cryptography expert - and to add more, he is the one who introduced me to the world of cryptography in 1999,

But honestly - you are here for the song. Aren't you? So without further ado, see the Video 1 below with a part of my live performance of the Cryptoucan™ song called "Pretty Good Privacy".

Video 1: Pretty Good Privacy (the Cryptoucan™ song) Yes, this is a gig from a two-hour long discussion panel about cryptography. Or did you think that cryptographers are boring?

 

Thank you for following Cryptoucan™ development and its (reasonably slow) introduction to the market and see you next week with more!

References

  1. https://www.linuxdays.cz/2018/

  2. https://cryptosession.cz/

  3. Wikipedia contributors. (2018, October 10). Symmetric-key algorithm. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 22:54, October 17, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Symmetric-key_algorithm&oldid=863406040

  4. Wikipedia contributors. (2018, October 16). Block cipher mode of operation. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 22:55, October 17, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Block_cipher_mode_of_operation&oldid=864354561#Electronic_Codebook_(ECB)

  5. Wikipedia contributors. (2018, October 16). Block cipher mode of operation. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 22:55, October 17, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Block_cipher_mode_of_operation&oldid=864354561#Cipher_Block_Chaining_(CBC)

  6. Wikipedia contributors. (2018, October 3). Galois/Counter Mode. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 22:56, October 17, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Galois/Counter_Mode&oldid=862356148

  7. Wikipedia contributors. (2018, October 11). Disk encryption theory. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 22:57, October 17, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Disk_encryption_theory&oldid=863565336#XTS

  8. http://crypto-world.info/vondruska/index.php

  9. https://www.mff.cuni.cz/

  10. https://trustica.cz/en/

  11. Wikipedia contributors. (2018, October 17). Discrete logarithm. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 23:00, October 17, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Discrete_logarithm&oldid=864436867

  12. Wikipedia contributors. (2018, October 5). Elliptic-curve cryptography. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 23:00, October 17, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Elliptic-curve_cryptography&oldid=862611556

  13. https://www.prf.jcu.cz/uai/uai/kontakty/zamestnanci-uai/dostalek-libor.html