For The Love of Crypto and Solving Mysteries: Meet Dan Shamow
For The Love of Crypto and Solving Mysteries: Meet Dan Shumow
Education is not something you do at school, college or university, and then finish. Education is for life!
And so my tip for staying ahead is to continually learn and push yourself. You need to know the new things, but also to look ahead to the horizon. For me, I pick a research paper to read, and then try to read it in detail, and understand what its purpose is, and how it could change thinking. I appreciate it is a challenge sometimes, but you will find a few which will change your viewpoints on things.
The most recent research paper that made a significant effect on my thinking is one by Dan Shumow, and which outlined a real cryptography vulnerability in Windows 10, and where corrupt encryption keys were created. In fact, around one in every 32,000 keys were corrupt. And, so, Dan loves this type of thing and focused on solving the mystery.
It resulted in my favouriate research paper of this year [here]:
I’ve read it back to front, and really understand the problem statement and how Dan has delivered on this. For me, I had forever taught RSA, but never really understood the consequences of not checking whether e shared a prime with either (p-1) or (q-1). In fact, I had to try it for myself, in order to prove the method than Dan had produced:
And it worked [here]!
Well, if you don’t know it, Dan has already made quite an impact on the world of crypto, and found a backdoor in the NIST-defined Dual EC random number generator. And that led to Snowden and Assange …
Julian Assange being arrested last week brought back the memories of how he leaked Edward Snowden’s memos around the…medium.com
So, there was only one thing for it … I contacted Dan, and here’s the interview:
The reason I love cryptography and cybersecurity is that I continually learn new things and that every day brings a new mystery to solve. Dan really brings this to the fore and just loves a challenge. He also remembers the mighty Peter L Montgomery [here], and that it is great to be a teacher to others (just that the pay is not so good when you're a school teacher).
Go fall in love with knowledge and research, and search for that great paper. If you are struggling, just read one of the classics, and there is no more of a classic than this one [here]:
