academic papers
Indistinguishability Obfuscation
Quanta magazine recently published a breathless article on indistinguishability obfuscation — calling it the “‘crown jewel’ of cryptography” — and saying that it had finally been achieved, based on a recently published ...
On Blockchain Voting
Blockchain voting is a spectacularly dumb idea for a whole bunch of reasons. I have generally quoted Matt Blaze: Why is blockchain voting a dumb idea? Glad you asked. For starters: It ...
Detecting Phishing Emails
Research paper: Rick Wash, “How Experts Detect Phishing Scam Emails“: Abstract: Phishing scam emails are emails that pretend to be something they are not in order to get the recipient of the ...
Determining What Video Conference Participants Are Typing from Watching Shoulder Movements
Accuracy isn’t great, but that it can be done at all is impressive. Murtuza Jadiwala, a computer science professor heading the research project, said his team was able to identify the contents ...
Split-Second Phantom Images Fool Autopilots
Researchers are tricking autopilots by inserting split-second images into roadside billboards. Researchers at Israel’s Ben Gurion University of the Negev … previously revealed that they could use split-second light projections on roads ...
Detecting Deep Fakes with a Heartbeat
Researchers can detect deep fakes because they don’t convincingly mimic human blood circulation in the face: In particular, video of a person’s face contains subtle shifts in color that result from pulses ...
On Executive Order 12333
Mark Jaycox has written a long article on the US Executive Order 12333: “No Oversight, No Limits, No Worries: A Primer on Presidential Spying and Executive Order 12,333“: Abstract: Executive Order 12,333 ...
Interesting Attack on the EMV Smartcard Payment Standard
It’s complicated, but it’s basically a man-in-the-middle attack that involves two smartphones. The first phone reads the actual smartcard, and then forwards the required information to a second phone. That second phone ...
