Neal Koblitz is a mathematician who, starting in the 1980s, became fascinated by mathematical questions in cryptography. In his article "The Uneasy Relationship Between Mathematics and Cryptography," ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Hard problems are usually not a welcome sight. But cryptographers love them. That’s because certain hard math problems underpin the ...

"Large bureaucracies, with the power that the computer gives them, become more powerful," said New York Times reporter David Burnham in a 1983 C-Span interview about his book The Rise of the Computer ...

Introduction to ciphers and substitution. Alice and Bob and Carl and Julius: terminology and Caesar Cipher ; The key to the matter: generalizing the Caesar Cipher ; Multiplicative ciphers ; Affine ...

If you’ve ever picked up a war novel, you know they tend to deal with the exploits of soldiers and sailors, the dirt and danger of the front lines. Not Neal Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon.” This ...

Two popular AES libraries, aes-js and pyaes, “helpfully” provide a default IV in their AES-CTR API, leading to a large number of key/IV reuse bugs. These bugs potentially affect thousands of ...

It all begins with mathematics really - the one true scientific language, so they say. Cryptography has been around as early as 4000 years ago, doing what it still does today - ensuring that secrets ...

Cryptography is just about as old as written communication itself, and mathematics has long supplied methods for the cryptographic toolbox. Starting in the 1970s, increasingly sophisticated ...