Episodes
Josh Brown and Paul Grubbs join us to describe how those damned spam calls work, and how STIR/SHAKEN is supposed to try to stop them, but have other privacy and security implications as well.  Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2024/04/30/stir-shaken/ Links:  - https://iacr.org/submit/files/slides/2024/rwc/rwc2024/98/slides.pdf - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3trxXF0-fRU - Paul Grubbs: https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~paulgrub/ "Security Cryptography Whatever" is hosted by...
Published 04/30/24
(NSFW) Three AI-generated guests rank cryptography things into a tier list. Play along at home and make your own tier list: https://tiermaker.com/create/cryptography-15683166 This episode is definitely not safe for work and definitely a parody. Do not base your decision in the 2024 election off of this podcast episode. No campaigns have endorsed this podcast. "Security Cryptography Whatever" is hosted by Deirdre Connolly (@durumcrustulum), Thomas Ptacek (@tqbf), and David Adrian...
Published 03/23/24
Published 03/23/24
Apple iMessage is getting a big upgrade! Not only are they rolling out ratcheting, but they’re going post-quantum, AND they’re doing post-quantum ratcheting! Douglas Stebila joined us to talk about his security analysis of the new PQ3 protocol update and not indulge our wild Apple speculations: Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2024/03/03/post-quantum-imessage-with-douglas-stebila/ Links: - https://security.apple.com/blog/imessage-pq3/ - Security analysis of the iMessage...
Published 03/03/24
We welcome Franziskus and Karthik from Cryspen to discuss their new high-assurance implementation of ML-KEM (the final form of Kyber), discussing how formal methods can both help provide correctness guarantees, security assurances, and performance wins for your crypto code! Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2024/01/29/high-assurance-kyber/ Links: - https://cryspen.com/post/ml-kem-implementation/ - https://github.com/cryspen/libcrux/ -...
Published 01/29/24
Facebook Messenger has finally been end-to-end encrypted, a couple of years after Mark Zuckerberg announced it! Plus Instagram DMs are trialing ephemeral E2EE DMs too! We invited on Jon Millican and Timothy Buck from Meta to discuss this major cross-platform endeavor, and how David Bowie fits into their personal Labyrinth. Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2023/12/28/e2ee-fb-messenger/ Links: - https://www.facebook.com/notes/2420600258234172 -...
Published 12/28/23
Returning champion Martin Albrecht joins us to help explain how we measure the security of lattice-based cryptosystems like Kyber and Dilithium against attackers. QRAM, BKZ, LLL, oh my! Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2023/11/13/lattice-attacks/ Links: - https://pq-crystals.org/kyber/index.shtml - https://pq-crystals.org/dilithium/index.shtml - https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/930.pdf - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_integer_solution_problem - Frodo:...
Published 11/13/23
We're back! Signal rolled out a protocol change to be post-quantum resilient! Someone was caught intercepting Jabber TLS via certificate transparency! Was the same-origin policy in web browers just a dirty hack all along? Plus secure message format formalisms, and even more beating of the dead horse that is E2EE in the browser. Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2023/11/07/PQXDH-etc Links: - https://zfnd.org/so-you-want-to-build-an-end-to-end-encrypted-web-app/ -...
Published 11/07/23
We explore how the NIST curve parameter seeds were generated, as best we can, with returning champion Steve Weis! “At the point where we find an intelligible English string that generates the NIST P-curve seeds, nobody serious is going to take the seed provenance concerns seriously anymore.” Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2023/10/12/the-nist-curves Links: - Steve’s post: https://saweis.net/posts/nist-curve-seed-origins.html - ANSI X9.62 ECDSA:...
Published 10/12/23
We're back from our summer vacation! We're covering a bunch of stuff we saw and did: Transcript:  https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2023/09/13/cruel-summer/ Links: - Zenbleed: https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/zenbleed.html - Downfall: https://downfall.page - Post-quantum Yubikeys: https://security.googleblog.com/2023/08/toward-quantum-resilient-security-keys.html "Security Cryptography Whatever" is hosted by Deirdre Connolly (@durumcrustulum), Thomas Ptacek (@tqbf), and David Adrian...
Published 09/13/23
What does P vs NP have to do with cryptography? Why do people love and laugh about the random oracle model? What's an oracle? What do you mean factoring and discrete log don't have proofs of hardness? How does any of this cryptography stuff work, anyway? We trapped Steve Weis into answering our many questions. Transcript:  https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2023/06/29/why-do-we-think-anything-is-secure-with-steve-weis/ Links: - The Random Oracle Methodology, Revisited:...
Published 06/29/23
Are Twitter’s new encrypted DMs unreadable even if you put a gun to Elon’s head? We invited Matthew Garrett on to do a deep decompiled dive into what kind of cryptography actually...
Published 05/29/23
WhatsApp has announced they’re rolling out key transparency! Doing this at WhatsApp-scale (aka billions and biiillions of keys) is a significant task, so we talked to Jasleen Malvai and Kevin Lewi about how it works. Transcript:  https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2023/05/06/whatsapp-key-transparency Links:  https://engineering.fb.com/2023/04/13/security/whatsapp-key-transparency/ https://github.com/facebook/akd Parkeet: https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/081.pdf CONIKS:...
Published 05/06/23
Messaging Layer Security (MLS) 1.0 is (basically) here! We invited Raphael Robert, coauthor of the MLS specification to explain it to us and answer our annoying questions (read: why does this exist?) Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2023/04/22/mls/ Links: - https://messaginglayersecurity.rocks/ - https://messaginglayersecurity.rocks/mls-protocol/draft-ietf-mls-protocol.html - https://messaginglayersecurity.rocks/mls-architecture/draft-ietf-mls-architecture.html -...
Published 04/22/23
Real World Cryptography 2023 is happening any moment now in Tokyo. Also, some phone basebands are broken. Links https://rwc.iacr.org/2023/https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2023/03/multiple-internet-to-baseband-remote-rce.html Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2023/03/24/rwc-2023/ "Security Cryptography Whatever" is hosted by Deirdre Connolly (@durumcrustulum), Thomas Ptacek (@tqbf), and David Adrian (@davidcadrian)
Published 03/25/23
Another day, another ostensibly secure messenger that quails under the gaze of some intrepid cryptographers. This time, it's Threema, and the gaze belongs to Kenny Paterson, Matteo Scarlata, and Kien Tuong Truong from ETH Zurich. Get ready for some stunt cryptography, like 2 Fast 2 Furious stunts. Transcript:...
Published 01/27/23
There's a paper that claims one can factor a RSA-2048 modulus with the help of a 372-qubit quantum computer. Are we all gonna die? Also some musings about Bruce Schneier. Errata: Schneier's honorary PhD is from the University of Westminster, not...
Published 01/07/23
David and Deirdre gab about some stuff we didn't get to or just recently happened, like Tailscale's new Tailnet Lock, the Okta breach, what the f**k CISOs are for anyway, Rust in Android and Chrome, passkeys support, and of course,...
Published 01/05/23
We talk to Kevin Riggle (@kevinriggle) about complexity and safety. We also talk about the Twitter acquisition. While recording, we discovered a new failure mode where Kevin couldn't hear Thomas, but David and Deirdre could, so there's not much Thomas this episode. If you ever need to get Thomas to voluntarily stop talking, simply mute him to half the audience! https://twitter.com/kevinriggle Transcript: https://beta-share.descript.com/view/WTrQGK4xEVj Errata It was the Mars Climate...
Published 11/24/22
No not the movie: the secure group messaging protocol! Or rather all the bugs and vulns that a team of researchers found when trying to formalize said protocol. Martin Albrecht and Dan Jones joined us to walk us through "Practically-exploitable Cryptographic Vulnerabilities in Matrix". Links:  https://nebuchadnezzar-megolm.github.io/static/paper.pdfhttps://nebuchadnezzar-megolm.github.ioSignal Private Group system:...
Published 11/02/22
We have Sarah Harvey (@worldwise001 on Twitter) to talk about SOC2, what it means, how to get it, and if it's important or not. The discussion centers around two blog posts written by Thomas: SOC2 Starting Seven: https://latacora.micro.blog/2020/03/12/the-soc-starting.htmlSOC2 at Fly: https://fly.io/blog/soc2-the-screenshots-will-continue-until-security-improves/Links: Tailscale recent post on getting SOC2’d: https://tailscale.com/blog/soc2-type2/SSO Tax: https://sso.taxDavid’s previous job:...
Published 10/16/22
This episode got delayed because David got COVID. Anyway, here's Nate Lawson: The Two Towers. Steven Chu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_ChuCFB: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_mode_of_operation#Cipher_feedback_(CFB)CCFB: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/11502760_19XXTEA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XXTEACHERI: https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~dstefan/cse227-spring20/papers/watson:cheri.pdf "Security. Cryptography. Whatever." is hosted by Deirdre Connolly, Thomas Ptacek,...
Published 09/29/22
We bring on Nate Lawson of Root Labs to talk about a little bit of everything, starting with cryptography in the 1990s. References IBM S/390: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5389176SSLv2 Spec: https://www-archive.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/nss/ssl/draft02.htmlXbox 360 HMAC: https://beta.ivc.no/wiki/index.php/Xbox_360_Timing_AttackGoogle Keyczar HMAC bug (reported by Nate): https://rdist.root.org/2009/05/28/timing-attack-in-google-keyczar-library/Errata HMAC actually published in...
Published 09/09/22
Are the isogenies kaput?! There's a new attack that breaks all the known parameter sets for SIDH/SIKE, so Steven Galbraith helps explain where the hell this came from, and where isogeny crypto goes from here. Transcript: https://share.descript.com/view/Xiv307FvOPA Merch: https://merch.scwpodcast.com Links: https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/975.pdfhttps://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1026.pdfhttps://ellipticnews.wordpress.com/2022/07/31/breaking-supersingular-isogeny-diffie-hellman-sidh/GPST active...
Published 08/11/22
Adam Langley (Google) comes on the podcast to talk about the evolution of WebAuthN and Passkeys! David's audio was a little finicky in this one. Believe us, it sounded worse before we edited it. Also, we occasionally accidentally refer to U2F as UTF. That's because we just really love strings. Transcript: https://share.descript.com/view/pBAXADn8gKW Links: GoogleIO PresentationWWDC PresentationW3C WebAuthNAdam's blog on passkeys and CABLECable / Hybrid PRCTAP spec from FIDONoise...
Published 08/11/22