Cryptomathic Blog

For trustworthy remote identity verification, a proof of the authenticity of the identity card and of the integrity of its contents is needed, along with reliable binding between the ID card and the identifying individual. Verification of biometric markers in a remote video identification procedure has long been undermined by deep fake technology. The recent hack of the Video-Ident procedure presents a more scalable attack and has further destroyed trust in online identity verification. A solution to this problem lies in the utilization of the NFC chip that is built into a growing number of national identity cards.

Just a month ago, NIST announced its selection of three digital signature algorithms and one key establishment mechanism (KEM) for future use in quantum-resistant cryptography applications. Also, four algorithms for post-quantum key establishment were selected as candidates for the 4^th round of evaluation, for potential standardization at a later time.

In this article, we proposeWhat-You-See-Is-What-You-Timestamp (WYSIWYT) as an attractive alternative to Qualified Electronic Signatures, for certain signing needs where non-repudiable user acceptance and integrity protection are required for a given contract or transaction, i.e. when documents need to be formally accepted, but where no fulfilment form is prescribed by national law.

An over five-year-long process has come to a preliminary end: On July 5, 2022, NIST issued the long-awaited announcement of the winners of Round 3 of the NIST Post-Quantum Crypto (PQC) Standardization Process, that is, which quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithms NIST has selected for standardization.

On April 19, 2022, information about a severe vulnerability in recent versions of Java shook up the security community.

Last month, one of the three NIST finalists for post-quantum signature schemes has received its final nail in the coffin: Ward Beullens, a PostDoc at IBM Research, published a practical key recovery attack against the Rainbow signature scheme.

During the last couple of weeks, a little shake went through parts of the security community. This was caused by a preprint by Professor Dr. Claus Peter Schnorr titled “Fast Factoring Integers by SVP Algorithms”, published on the IACR’s E-print Server.

Since the announcement of the SolarWinds supply chain attack, intensive analysis has been done by Crowdstrike, FireEye (with additional details), Microsoft, Symantec, SolarWinds, and many others, to understand the attack’s workings both within SolarWinds and in the targeted networks. Here we focus on the code signing procedures, which seemingly failed at SolarWinds but likely could have mitigated the risk of the attack if they had been implemented and enforced to a higher standard.

There is no silver bullet when it comes to securing “the” Internet of Things, instead, a careful analysis of the individual application is needed. In this article we explore a methodical, yet pragmatic approach to securing IOT devices.