A Blog about Security and Cryptography
Introduction It has come to my attention that people are wagering dinner invitations to anyone who can convince me to publicly state my opinions and reasonings on hybrid signatures. So in the interest of not having people starve, here is a blog post on this topic and the recent controversies surrounding it. This is going [ ]
FN-DSA (née Falcon) is a proposed post-quantum signature standard that keeps polarizing engineers. Cryptography engineers on the one hand, tasked with potentially implementing this monstrosity, hate it with a passion. Protocol engineers on the other hand, especially when working with UDP, see a glimmer of hope that they might not have to deal with packet [ ]
After publishing my series on UOV, one feedback I got was that my blog posts made people feel more confident in the security of the scheme, because at least someone is looking into these things . I don t necessarily know if that is the takeaway I would make from my posts, but it gave me the [ ]
What is this? There have been some recent concerns about ML-KEM, NIST s standard for encryption with Post-Quantum Cryptography, related standards of the IETF, and lots of conspiracy theories about malicious actors subverting the standardization process. As someone who has been involved with this standardization process at pretty much every level, here a quick debunking of [ ]
When I first learned about Diffie-Hellman and especially elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman, I had one rather obvious question: Why elliptic curves? Why use this strange group that seems rather arbitrary, with its third intersection of a line and then reflected? Why not use, say, the Monster Group? Surely a monster is better equipped to guard your [ ]
Last time I had an issue with standardization going into the, in my opinion, wrong direction, I wrote a blog post about it. Much to my own surprise, that actually worked, and as a reward you get more blog posts about somewhat convoluted standardization issues. In order to entice you to at least skim the [ ]
In Part I, we looked at the problem we want attackers of UOV to solve. In Part II we had plenty of oil and vinegar, but did not really discussed the whole unbalanced part of the scheme. So in this third part of this three part series, I will discuss why we are using Unbalanced [ ]
After Part I looked at the hard problem underlying Unbalanced Oil and Vinegar, it is now finally time to talk about the algorithm itself. Verify As with many signature algorithms, looking at the verification routine first is a good idea. The verification algorithm is usually simpler, and gives you an idea of what the signature [ ]
Introduction While there are many schemes discussed in the currently ongoing second onramp for PQC signatures, Unbalanced Oil and Vinegar (UOV) is both one of the most serious contenders and also an extremely curious scheme. In this three part blog series, we will take a closer look. In a previous blog post, I looked at [ ]
I mentioned ranted about this topic as a section of a previous blog post (at the very end), but the topic keeps coming up, so I am escalating to a full blog post, since obviously that will help with all these people who are wrong on the internet standardization. The Problem Prehashing is a paradigm [ ]
