This Year in Crypto

Presented at Summercon 2018, June 30, 2018, noon (50 minutes)

Sometime in the last year, the word "crypto" became a dirty word. While linguists have been focused on debating abbreviation cannibalism in adjacent tech circles, it has also been a quietly interesting year for cryptography. From new theoretical advances in post-quantum cryptography and zero-knowledge proofs, to the discovery of efficient trilinear maps, to the rise of secure transport protocols like TLS 1.3 and secure group messaging proposals like MLS, cryptography nerds have a lot to talk about. This year has also been a challenging year for cryptographic technologies. Vulnerabilities in the software that supports cryptography in the Desktop version of Signal and GPG Tools and the surprising ROBOT vulnerability continued to highlight the fact that "secure" protocols are not secure without secure implementations. In the geopolitical realm, encryption issues have flared up, culminating with Russia's attempts to block Telegram and major cloud companies deciding to disable domain fronting. This talk will attempt to distill the last year in crypto down to a short talk.


Presenters:

  • Nick Sullivan
    Nick Sullivan is an online computer security commentator and sometimes programmer. He runs the cryptography team at Cloudflare and is focused on improving cryptographic security online. He's most well-known for his work on TLS 1.3, standing in front of lava lamps, the Heartbleed Challenge, his introduction to elliptic curve cryptography, and being the jerk responsible for FairPlay DRM. @grittygrease

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