My Top 10 Stories From 2019
My Top 10 Stories From 2019
As an academic researcher, I know the importance of public engagement and in knowledge exchange. In our communities, too, it is important that we spread knowledge, and stimulate (and contribute to) debate. And so you never quite know which blog articles are going to find any interest, so here’s my Top 10 views and claps on my articles of 2019:
- 225K views, 980 claps: As a PhD Examiner … My Top 25 Tips for PhD students
I have done many MSc/PhD examinations, and I enjoy them so much. With PhD thesis’ I especially like seeing the face of…medium.com
2. 113K views, 2.1K claps: The Beginning of the End of WPA-2 — Cracking WPA-2 Just Got a Whole Lot Easier
It has been known for a while that WPA-2 (802.11i) has some fundamental security problems, and that these have thus led…medium.com
3. 29K views, 330 claps: Doh! What My Encrypted Drive Can Be Unlocked By Anyone?
4. 27K views, 519 claps: The British Airways Hack: JavaScript Weakness Pin-pointed Through Time-lining
Why Modernization Is Not A Good Thingmedium.com
5. 16.6K views, 1K claps. My Top 10 Digital Things To Learn in 2019:
Okay. I’m an academic, so I love learning things. Our life should be build around us continually learning, and never…medium.com
6. 16.3K views, 109 claps. The Fall of TrueCrypt and Rise of VeraCrypt:
Today a paper was published that showcased problems with BitLocker, and where it was possible to comprise SSDs which…medium.com
7. 14.1K views, 340 claps. Cracking RSA — A Challenge Generator:
Do you have what it takes to be a cipher cracker? Well here is a challenge for you [here]:medium.com
8. 12.7K, 590 claps. Goodbye OpenSSL, and Hello To Google Tink
Which program has never reached Version 1.2, but is used as a core of security on the Internet? OpenSSL.medium.com
9. 12.5K, 20 claps. Electronic Code Book (ECB) and Cipher Block Chaining (CBC)
Encryption normally works by taking a number of text blocks, and then applies a key to these to produce cipher blocks…medium.com
10. 11.4K, 398 claps. The Wonderful World of Elliptic Curve Cryptography:
So what stimulated interest? Well sharing viewpoints on things (my PhD and 2019 blog postings), picking up on news items (Veracrypt, BA, and SSD encryption problems), and sharing new viewpoints on things (ECC, ECB, RSA, etc). Basically, for me, blogging is a sketch pad for drafting out ideas, and see how they turn out. I hope they aren’t just random thoughts, as I try, as much as possible, to add code to the concepts I discuss. In fact, I often start with a code example, and then build the blog item around it. Someone, somewhere, can pick up the code, and hopefully get some use out of it. I find, as an industry, we are not often the best at articulating things in a way that the general public could make any sense of.
If you are interested in setting up a Medium blog, to give you a measure of its impact, I get around 50K views per month (and around 1.5K per day) and of which around half of these are actually reads.