rdv live from Tokyo

After a quiet interval of just two weeks shy of a decade, on December 2nd the team of F. Boudot, P. Gaudry, A. Guillevic, N. Heninger, E. Th...

This morning I talked to Julie Manning, Bill's wife. Bill died early Saturday morning, at home in Oregon.  Most of you know Bill was...

For reference, here is a calendar for upcoming quantum workshops and conferences that seem to be kept up to date: Quantum Technology Lab ...

Linear cryptanalysis (LC) is a known plaintext attack, developed by  Mitsuru Matsui in 1990 after being inspired by differential cryptanaly...

(I'm back, after a bit of a break. If you missed it, you can go back to the beginning of  What Every Quantum Researcher and Engineer Sho...

It seems the height of hubris to declare the "best books of the decade", when I read perhaps three hundred in that time span, whi...

Just a short list of network/graph visualization software we have used for various things. I keep losing track of them, so I figured it was ...

You're probably familiar with the basic idea of the birthday paradox : If you have $n$ people in a room, what's the probability of t...

(Edited on 20/2/29 and 20/5/19, as noted in line.) The field of quantum computing, broadly constituted, is changing rapidly. Hundreds, ...

Claude Shannon, in his seminal article on the mathematics of cryptography , defined two concepts he called diffusion  and confusion .  In di...

2.1.1 Entropy The single most important concept in cryptography -- indeed, in all of information theory, and inarguably one of the most im...

The general idea of trying to decode messages that are encrypted is known as cryptanalysis . Some of the planet's smartest people have...

Coming soon to a blog near you!

One obvious problem with the most straightforward application of a block cipher is that it's deterministic.  If you just apply the trans...

AES, the Advanced Encryption Standard, has replaced DES.  It is a type of block cipher known as a substitution-permutation cipher .  AES use...

[Important update, 10/25 0630. Dave Bacon has corrected me.  The chip is  fully programmable. I had thought that the choice of coupler patte...

DES, the Data Encryption Standard, was designed by IBM in the 1970s, consulting with the NSA.  DES is a type of cipher known as an iterative...

D-H and RSA are pretty easy to understand, and known to be vulnerable to quantum computers, hence attract a lot of attention. The workhorse ...

See the previous section here . The other algorithm we talk about a lot as being both important and vulnerable to Shor's factoring alg...

Previous post in this series is here . Okay, time to dive into this in more technical depth. Let's go phase by phase: 1.1 Authentica...