Tagg: cryptographic hash functions

What’s the Problem? Someone brought this data de-duplication problem to me: There’s an ever-growing collection of video files. For reasons out of our control, the collection process leads to duplicate uploads. A file will get a unique name, unique timestamp, all its metadata unique, but it’s an identical copy of an existing file that has […]

Last week I encouraged you to use Amazon’s cheap and extremely resilient Glacier service to archive your personal data. Let’s see how to do this. Glacier uses the same storage technology as S3, for just one-tenth the cost. The primary trade-off is that Glacier is intended for archiving data, not using it, and to get […]

Some top cryptographers have recently announced a significant step toward breaking the SHA-1 hash algorithm. Their work is described here and here, and also check out their paper. What does this mean for you and your organization? Let me start with a bit of background so the following makes sense. What Is A Hash? A […]

Researchers at Purdue’s CERIAS group have developed a way of strengthening traditional password authentication against sophisticated attacks. Not only is the defense practical — you can download the PAM security module from GitHub — but it also includes a built-in alarm that warns you when attacker try to use decoy passwords they believe they have […]

I have to confess that I just don’t get Bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies. I don’t mean the cryptographic part of it, I do understand how it works. And Silk Road and its replacements demonstrate the utility. But I don’t get why so many people use it the way they do. Cryptocurrency today seems to […]