Memorandum I filed in response to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's invitation for public comment on Senate bill No. 2175 entitled "An Act Relative to Civil Unions"
Recently published papers have raised serious concerns about the security of these popular wireless networing tools. We give some practical suggestions.
Pass phrase management is arguably one of the weakest links in the PGP security chain. To gather some facts on actual pass phrase usage, I conducted a survey over the Internet. The results of that survey are presented here. Not surprisingly, I found a significant minority of users choose weak passphrases. Corrective measures, including the use of computationally intensive hash algorithms, are presented.
The question of whether P = NP is widely considered to be important to cryptography. In a pair of postings to sci.crypt, I point out that this is absolute nonsense and that classical mathematical complexity theory is pretty much irrelevant to actual computing.
A brief I filed before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in the DeCSS case, Universal v. Reimerdes. I argue that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) should be held unconstitutional as an overbroad restriction on the freedom of speech.
Leo Marks has written an entertaining, yet historically significant autobiography of his wartime experiences working as a cryptographher for Britian's Special Operations Executive. I review his book from a crypto perspective.
A Web page designed to help people who are not into the cryptographic culture make up secure passphrases using the Diceware method.
Truly random quantities are a raw ingredient for many cryptographic applications. Generating randomness by computer can be done but offers numerous opportunities for error and attack. Simple dice present an attractive alternative if used properly. This paper presents a number of techniques for using dice in conjunction with modern cryptographic software. This is my original paper. A more complete discussion and a word list for generating passphrases using dice is presented on the Diceware Passphrase Home Page.
A simple Java applet to help you generate random passwords for login control and other purposes. Uses the time between your key strokes as a source of randomness. Not as secure as the diceware method, above.
Find out how you can protect your right to communicate in secrecy by building you own encryption program. It's easy!
Most people are not good at memorizing even modest amounts of meaningless information. As a result, when they are asked to create a security password or passphrase, they often pick one that is either too short or too easy to guess. This paper presents a family of key stretching algorithms, which I call HEKS, for Hash Extended Key Stretcher, and describes two versions in detail.
Why does the human body reject transplanted tissues? Almost all cells in the body have a surface protein called MHC that presents fragments of cell protein to T-cells who verify that the cell is uninfected and behaving properly. Which protein fragments are presented varies between individuals. In effect, the MHC protein acts like a cryptographic identification system. Your body rejects foreign tissue because it has a different key. An analysis of the key size and code space suggest factors that controlled the evolution of the MHC system.
Figure 1 for the above paper.
It might be nice to convert Venus' atmosphere to make it more like Earth's. Unfortunately, there is too much carbon to get rid of.
The recent discovery of water ice near the lunar poles has increased interest in building a station there. This paper, submitted for a NASA outreach project in 1990 points out another advantage of a polar locale: the potential for continuous solar power.
Bell's Inequalities play an important role in Quantum Mechanics, yet they are actually just theorems in Probability theory. Here is a simple explanation based on Jay Sulzberger's work.
Stories about a number of computers that started the personal-scale computing tradition, including the IBM 650, LGP-30, IBM 1620 and IBM 1130. These essays were originally posted to alt.folklore.computers. Reviesed Feb. 97
A for-the-fun-of-it Web page listing movies with good mathematics scenes. "*** Totally delightful" Excite Reviews and Movie Guides
Useful tips collected during my son's first six years. He's older now so I don't know anyway near as much.
A mnemonic chart to help you learn the Morse code. --- -.- ? Based on an idea of Max Reinhold, o.b.m.