Apple has pulled the availability of their opt-in iCloud end-to-end encryption feature, called Advanced Data Protection, in the UK. This doesn't only affect UK Apple users, however. To help us make sense of this surprising move from the fruit company, we got Matt Green, Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins, and Joe Hall, Distinguished Technologist at the Internet Society, on the horn. Recorded Saturday February 22nd, 2025. Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2025/02/24/appl...
Feb 25, 2025•49 min•Ep 10•Transcript available on Metacast 'Let us model our large language model as a hash function—' Sold. Our special guest Nicholas Carlini joins us to discuss differential cryptanalysis on LLMs and other attacks, just as the ones that made OpenAI turn off some features, hehehehe. Watch episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/vZ64xPI2Rc0 Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2025/01/28/cryptanalyzing-llms-with-nicholas-carlini/ Links: - https://nicholas.carlini.com - “Stealing Part of a Production Language Model...
Jan 28, 2025•1 hr 21 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast Just a few days before turning off the lights, the Biden administration dropped a huge cybersecurity executive order including a lot of good stuff, that hopefully [cross your fingers, knock wood, spin around three times and spit] will last into future administrations. We snagged some time with Carole House, outgoing Special Advisor and Acting Senior Director for Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure Policy, National Security Council in the Biden-Harris White House, to give us a brain dump. A...
Jan 21, 2025•57 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast THE QUANTUM COMPUTERS ARE COMING...right? We got Samuel Jacques and John Schanck at short notice to answer that question plus a bunch of other about error correcting codes, logical qubits, T-gates, and more about Google's new quantum computer Willow. Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2024/12/18/quantum-willow Links: - https://blog.google/technology/research/google-willow-quantum-chip/ - https://research.google/blog/making-quantum-error-correction-work/ - https://blog.goog...
Dec 18, 2024•54 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast Nothing we have ever recorded on SCW has brought so much joy to David. However, at several points during the episode, we may have witnessed Matthew Green's soul leave his body. Our esteemed guests Justin Schuh and Matt Green joined us to debate whether `Dual_EC_DRBG` was intentionally backdoored by the NSA or 'just' a major fuckup. Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2024/12/07/dual-ec-drbg Links: - Dicky George at InfiltrateCon 2014, 'Life at Both Ends of th...
Dec 07, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast You may not be rewriting the world in Rust, but if you follow the findings of the Android team and our guest Jeff Vander Stoep, you'll drive down your memory-unsafety vulnerabilities more than 2X below the industry average over time! 🎉 Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2024/10/15/a-little-bit-of-rust-goes-a-long-way/ Links: - https://security.googleblog.com/2024/09/eliminating-memory-safety-vulnerabilities-Android.html - “Safe Coding”: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3651...
Oct 15, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast With the 2024 United States Presidential Election right around the corner, we talk to an unnamed guest who has worked on cybersecurity for political campaigns in the United States since 2004. We recorded this in late August, 2024. Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2024/10/13/campaign-security/ Links: - Active Measures by Thomas Rind: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374287269/activemeasures - Aurora: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation\_Aurora - Google APP announcement, ...
Oct 13, 2024•1 hr 24 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast We finally have an excuse to tear down Telegram! Their CEO got arrested by the French, apparently not because the cryptography in Telegram is bad, but special guest Matt Green joined us to talk about how the cryptography is bad anyway, and you probably shouldn't use Telegram as a secure messenger of any kind! Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2024/09/06/telegram Links: - https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2024/08/25/telegram-is-not-really-an-encrypted-messaging-app/...
Sep 07, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast Are you going to be in Vegas during BlackHat / DEF CON? We're hosting a mixer, sponsored by Observa ! We have limited capacity, so please only register if you can actually come. Location details are in the confirmation email. Tickets will be released in batches, so if you get waitlisted, there's a good chance you still get in. Looking forward to seeing you in Vegas! Ticket Link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/scwpod-vegas-2024-tickets-946939099337 We talk about CrowdStrike in this episod...
Jul 25, 2024•57 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast We have Mark Dowd on, founder of Aziumuth Security and one of the authors of The Art of Software Security Assessment, to talk about the market for zero day vulnerabilities, and how mitigations affect monetizing offensive security work. Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2024/06/24/mdowd/ Links: https://www.azimuthsecurity.com/ https://www.vigilantlabs.com/ https://github.com/mdowd79/presentations/blob/main/bluehat2023-mdowd-final.pdf https://i.blackhat.com/USA21/Wednesday-Hando...
Jun 24, 2024•1 hr 26 min•Ep 11•Transcript available on Metacast iykyk Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2024/05/25/ekr/ Links: - https://hovav.net/ucsd/dist/draft-shacham-tls-fasttrack-00.txt - https://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/pubs/papers/fasttrack.pdf - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8446 - SoK: SCT Auditing in Certificate Transparency: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.01661 - A hard look at Certificate Transparency, Part I: Transparency Systems: https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/transparency-part-1/ - A hard look at Certificate Tr...
May 24, 2024•2 hr 48 min•Ep 10•Transcript available on Metacast Josh Brown and Paul Grubbs join us to describe how those damned spam calls work, and how STIR/SHAKEN is supposed to try to stop them, but have other privacy and security implications as well. Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2024/04/30/stir-shaken/ Links: - https://iacr.org/submit/files/slides/2024/rwc/rwc2024/98/slides.pdf - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3trxXF0-fRU - Paul Grubbs: https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~paulgrub/ "Security Cryptography Whatever" is hosted by...
Apr 30, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast (NSFW) Three AI-generated guests rank cryptography things into a tier list. Play along at home and make your own tier list: https://tiermaker.com/create/cryptography-15683166 This episode is definitely not safe for work and definitely a parody. Do not base your decision in the 2024 election off of this podcast episode. No campaigns have endorsed this podcast. "Security Cryptography Whatever" is hosted by Deirdre Connolly (@durumcrustulum), Thomas Ptacek (@tqbf), and David Adrian (@davi...
Mar 23, 2024•19 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast Apple iMessage is getting a big upgrade! Not only are they rolling out ratcheting, but they’re going post-quantum, AND they’re doing post-quantum ratcheting! Douglas Stebila joined us to talk about his security analysis of the new PQ3 protocol update and not indulge our wild Apple speculations: Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2024/03/03/post-quantum-imessage-with-douglas-stebila/ Links: - https://security.apple.com/blog/imessage-pq3/ - Security analysis of the iMessage PQ3 p...
Mar 03, 2024•56 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast We welcome Franziskus and Karthik from Cryspen to discuss their new high-assurance implementation of ML-KEM (the final form of Kyber), discussing how formal methods can both help provide correctness guarantees, security assurances, and performance wins for your crypto code! Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2024/01/29/high-assurance-kyber/ Links: - https://cryspen.com/post/ml-kem-implementation/ - https://github.com/cryspen/libcrux/ - https://github.com/formosa-crypto/libjade ...
Jan 29, 2024•56 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast Facebook Messenger has finally been end-to-end encrypted, a couple of years after Mark Zuckerberg announced it! Plus Instagram DMs are trialing ephemeral E2EE DMs too! We invited on Jon Millican and Timothy Buck from Meta to discuss this major cross-platform endeavor, and how David Bowie fits into their personal Labyrinth. Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2023/12/28/e2ee-fb-messenger/ Links: - https://www.facebook.com/notes/2420600258234172 - https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1044...
Dec 28, 2023•1 hr•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast Returning champion Martin Albrecht joins us to help explain how we measure the security of lattice-based cryptosystems like Kyber and Dilithium against attackers. QRAM, BKZ, LLL, oh my! Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2023/11/13/lattice-attacks/ Links: - https://pq-crystals.org/kyber/index.shtml - https://pq-crystals.org/dilithium/index.shtml - https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/930.pdf - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_integer_solution_problem - Frodo: https://eprint.iacr.org...
Nov 13, 2023•57 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast We're back! Signal rolled out a protocol change to be post-quantum resilient! Someone was caught intercepting Jabber TLS via certificate transparency! Was the same-origin policy in web browers just a dirty hack all along? Plus secure message format formalisms, and even more beating of the dead horse that is E2EE in the browser. Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2023/11/07/PQXDH-etc Links: - https://zfnd.org/so-you-want-to-build-an-end-to-end-encrypted-web-app/ - https://g...
Nov 07, 2023•1 hr 19 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast We explore how the NIST curve parameter seeds were generated, as best we can, with returning champion Steve Weis! “At the point where we find an intelligible English string that generates the NIST P-curve seeds, nobody serious is going to take the seed provenance concerns seriously anymore.” Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2023/10/12/the-nist-curves Links: - Steve’s post: https://saweis.net/posts/nist-curve-seed-origins.html - ANSI X9.62 ECDSA: https://safecurves.cr.yp.to/gr...
Oct 12, 2023•58 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast We're back from our summer vacation! We're covering a bunch of stuff we saw and did: Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2023/09/13/cruel-summer/ Links: - Zenbleed: https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/zenbleed.html - Downfall: https://downfall.page - Post-quantum Yubikeys: https://security.googleblog.com/2023/08/toward-quantum-resilient-security-keys.html "Security Cryptography Whatever" is hosted by Deirdre Connolly (@durumcrustulum), Thomas Ptacek (@tqbf), and David...
Sep 13, 2023•59 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast What does P vs NP have to do with cryptography? Why do people love and laugh about the random oracle model? What's an oracle? What do you mean factoring and discrete log don't have proofs of hardness? How does any of this cryptography stuff work, anyway? We trapped Steve Weis into answering our many questions. Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2023/06/29/why-do-we-think-anything-is-secure-with-steve-weis/ Links: - The Random Oracle Methodology, Revisited: https://epr...
Jun 29, 2023•46 min•Ep 15•Transcript available on Metacast Are Twitter’s new encrypted DMs unreadable even if you put a gun to Elon’s head? We invited Matthew Garrett on to do a deep decompiled dive into what kind of cryptography actually shipped. Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2023/05/29/elons-encrypted-dms-with-matthew-garrett/ Links: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/66791.html https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/encrypted-direct-messages https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/11/twitter-launches-not-actually-encrypted-encrypted-dms/...
May 29, 2023•52 min•Ep 14•Transcript available on Metacast WhatsApp has announced they’re rolling out key transparency! Doing this at WhatsApp-scale (aka billions and biiillions of keys) is a significant task, so we talked to Jasleen Malvai and Kevin Lewi about how it works. Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2023/05/06/whatsapp-key-transparency Links: https://engineering.fb.com/2023/04/13/security/whatsapp-key-transparency/ https://github.com/facebook/akd Parkeet: https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/081.pdf CONIKS: https://eprint.iacr.org/20...
May 06, 2023•56 min•Ep 13•Transcript available on Metacast Messaging Layer Security (MLS) 1.0 is (basically) here! We invited Raphael Robert, coauthor of the MLS specification to explain it to us and answer our annoying questions (read: why does this exist?) Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2023/04/22/mls/ Links: - https://messaginglayersecurity.rocks/ - https://messaginglayersecurity.rocks/mls-protocol/draft-ietf-mls-protocol.html - https://messaginglayersecurity.rocks/mls-architecture/draft-ietf-mls-architecture.html - https://gith...
Apr 22, 2023•55 min•Ep 12•Transcript available on Metacast Real World Cryptography 2023 is happening any moment now in Tokyo. Also, some phone basebands are broken. Links https://rwc.iacr.org/2023/ https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2023/03/multiple-internet-to-baseband-remote-rce.html Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2023/03/24/rwc-2023/ "Security Cryptography Whatever" is hosted by Deirdre Connolly (@durumcrustulum), Thomas Ptacek (@tqbf), and David Adrian (@davidcadrian)...
Mar 25, 2023•55 min•Ep 11•Transcript available on Metacast Another day, another ostensibly secure messenger that quails under the gaze of some intrepid cryptographers. This time, it's Threema, and the gaze belongs to Kenny Paterson, Matteo Scarlata, and Kien Tuong Truong from ETH Zurich. Get ready for some stunt cryptography, like 2 Fast 2 Furious stunts. Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2023/01/27/threema/ Links: https://breakingthe3ma.app/ https://threema.ch/press-files/2_documentation/cryptography_whitepaper.pdf https://three...
Jan 27, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep 10•Transcript available on Metacast There's a paper that claims one can factor a RSA-2048 modulus with the help of a 372-qubit quantum computer. Are we all gonna die? Also some musings about Bruce Schneier. Errata: Schneier's honorary PhD is from the University of Westminster, not UW. Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2023/01/06/has-rsa-been-destroyed-by-a-quantum-computer/ Links: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.12372.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/232.pdf https://github.com/lducas/SchnorrGate https://swe...
Jan 07, 2023•41 min•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast David and Deirdre gab about some stuff we didn't get to or just recently happened, like Tailscale's new Tailnet Lock, the Okta breach, what the fuck CISOs are for anyway, Rust in Android and Chrome, passkeys support, and of course, SBF. Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2023/01/04/end-of-year-wrap-up/ Links: https://tailscale.com/blog/tailnet-lock/ https://security.googleblog.com/2022/12/memory-safe-languages-in-android-13.html https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.or...
Jan 05, 2023•59 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast We talk to Kevin Riggle ( @kevinriggle ) about complexity and safety. We also talk about the Twitter acquisition. While recording, we discovered a new failure mode where Kevin couldn't hear Thomas, but David and Deirdre could, so there's not much Thomas this episode. If you ever need to get Thomas to voluntarily stop talking, simply mute him to half the audience! https://twitter.com/kevinriggle Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2022/11/24/software-safety-and-twitter-...
Nov 24, 2022•59 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast No not the movie: the secure group messaging protocol! Or rather all the bugs and vulns that a team of researchers found when trying to formalize said protocol. Martin Albrecht and Dan Jones joined us to walk us through "Practically-exploitable Cryptographic Vulnerabilities in Matrix". Transcript : https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2022/11/02/Matrix-with-Martin-Albrecht-Dan-Jones/ Links: https://nebuchadnezzar-megolm.github.io/static/paper.pdf https://nebuchadnezzar-megolm.githu...
Nov 02, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast 
