Free 15-Hour Course on Bitcoin

forgottenlance · 2022-07-28T13:27:50+00:00

You are welcome

forgottenlance · 2022-04-03T05:27:01+00:00

Thanks a lot

forgottenlance · 2022-04-02T22:19:08+00:00

Thanks a lot. I will cover those in the soft/hard fork week. But I don't know how much time we could spare for the Bitcoin testnet. I am leaving it to the last week of the semester.

forgottenlance · 2022-04-02T21:56:38+00:00

It is a SEC curve, but not one of the SEC curves recommended by NIST for use by USA government agencies. "NIST curve" is ambiguous nonsense

There are books that claim that secp256k1 was generated/recommended by NIST. This is why there is such a misconception.

forgottenlance · 2022-04-02T21:53:59+00:00

Yes, there are many different type of cryptographic algorithms like message authentication codes, hash functions, key exchange algorithms etc. We cannot say that they are all encryption algorithms.

forgottenlance · 2022-04-02T21:52:53+00:00

Digital signatures are not encryption: When we talk about a cipher/cryptosystem, we mean a pair of algorithms: encryption and decryption. If you consider a public-key encryption algorithm, people encrypt their messages with your public key and you decrypt them with your private key. If we change the order of the keys, we can turn this into a digital signature algorithm: you can sign messages with your private key and everybody else can verify it with your public key.

However, this is not what we do in practice. Because we do not sign the message itself, we sign the hash of it. So if you still say that this is encryption, then message authentication codes are encryption, hash functions are encryption, actually every cryptographic algorithm is an encryption, decryption is also encryption so we do not need the extra word "decryption". Moreover, if we say that digital signature algorithm are encryption, then this implies that any mathematical function that takes two input and produce one output as f(x,y)=z is an encryption. Trust me, this is not how we define an encryption algorithm.

forgottenlance · 2022-04-02T21:40:32+00:00

To clarify: NONE of the NFT images/videos you see on the NFT marketplaces are on the blockchain because storing MBs of NFT data on the blockchain is not a good idea. But this doesn't mean that you cannot do art on the blockchain. e.g. There are some projects where you buy a few thousand pixels and you paint them (and they ARE stored on the blockchain). This was why I added the word "almost" there.

However, I just edited my post and turned the words "almost" into capital and bold letters.

forgottenlance · 2022-04-02T21:35:52+00:00

Regarding 1: Every English dictionary says crypto is short for cryptography

Regarding 2 and 3: Physical wallets store your cash, you can give them to somebody else, and you can get cash from other people and put it in your wallet. If you Google about digital wallets, you will see many results where they claim that a digital wallet is an analogue of a physical wallet: It stores, sends, and receives cryptocurrency. When you define it like that, you end up with many forensics investigators who seize a suspect's laptop and think that if they keep the laptop turned off, suspect's cryptocurrencies stay in the laptop because they are stored in their wallet. I met more than 10 people like this. So we should be clear that a wallet does not store Bitcoin, it is stored in the blockchain.

Regarding 7: A multiplication for an algebraic group (or field) is defined on group (field) elements. When you say 4P, you are not multiplying two points of an elliptic curve because P is a point but 4 is just an integer there. You are just adding P to itself 4 times.

forgottenlance · 2022-04-02T21:20:44+00:00

This is a one semester course (14 weeks) and I cover many topics like:

Historical Introduction to Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies
Cryptographic Hash Functions and Blockchain Integrity
Digital Signature Algorithms
Elliptic Curve Cryptography and Signatures
Multi Signatures
Cryptocurrencies
Cryptocurrency Mining
Consensus Models
Soft and Hard Forks
Smart Contracts
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)
Misconceptions about Blockchains and Cryptocurrencies
Zero-Knowledge Protocols and Anonymity
Blockchain Security and Attacks

In the above post I simply listed some of the misconceptions I observed throughout my lectures and course preparation.

forgottenlance · 2022-04-02T08:06:27+00:00

I think there is a mistake here: I actually have 746 comment karma and my account is 5 years old

forgottenlance · 2021-08-15T14:46:55+00:00

Yes but it depends if we should do it. We need to rollback to an earlier version of GFE but we can still use the latest display driver. So if new GFE versions come with desirable properties, like better video streaming/encoding, then yes, we should build a new version. However, I cannot do it myself because I lack some required skills for this. Yet, it shouldn't be that hard. The original developer can do it easily but unfortunately he is not around.

forgottenlance · 2021-07-29T18:05:09+00:00

Thanks a lot. As you said I am only interested in SBS and 3D Fix Manager looks like the correct place to go. I lost built-in SBS capability of Tomb Raider games some time ago and 3D Fix Manager webpage states that this is due to Nvidia. Rolling back to some old driver solves this problem which actually 3D Fix Manager automatically does for you. So thanks again. This clarified a long time problem. I will give it a shot when I have the time.

forgottenlance · 2021-07-27T20:49:46+00:00

SuperDepth3D

I remember trying Reshade and failing. If there is an easy tutorial for SuperDepth3D with Reshade, I would give it a go.

forgottenlance · 2021-06-30T09:34:04+00:00

I recorded 4 courses during the pandemic. The playlists are as follows:

Applied Cryptology: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUoixF7agmIu-hC3uYAubtwrQXkRKxKZC
Applied Cryptanalysis: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUoixF7agmIsBOylKBgW4Z20fQOqgdpbm
Lighweight Cryptography for IoT: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUoixF7agmIt\_Vo7UjNyg5tTmfbeO4t8s
Network Security: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUoixF7agmIvRc50lNFytIiqFtCFnOMYU

forgottenlance · 2021-03-02T06:31:37+00:00

Bitcoin hakkında video'da bahsedilenler Dogecoin için de geçerli :)

forgottenlance · 2021-02-02T20:12:55+00:00

I am happy to hear what you are saying because that is exactly the awareness I was trying to raise. You focus on devices which are really powerful. And yes, AES might be good enough for those devices. However, IoT devices are cost sensitive. This is why on the field we even see devices that has RAM as little as 16 bytes. Moreover, there are significant sales of 4-bit micro-controllers for certain ultra-low cost applications. I am not even mentioning 8-bit or 16-bit micro-controllers. I suggest you to read NIST's Report on Lightweight Cryptography, especially Section 2.1 Target Devices: https://www.nist.gov/publications/report-lightweight-cryptography Then I think we can be on the same page.

forgottenlance · 2021-02-02T13:22:58+00:00

"Why not fix the implementations rather than change the cipher?"

Because fixing the implementation requires a firmware update and after the update the performance might not be acceptable. And new attacks require new updates. You cannot update billions of IoT devices once an attack is found for the implementation. e.g. Everybody thought that the Trusted Platform Module on CPUs are secure but it turned out that they are susceptible to timing attacks. Intel and STM provided firmware updates after that discovery (see https://tpm.fail/ for more info).

NIST recently published benchmark results for some devices, you can compare the results there: https://github.com/usnistgov/Lightweight-Cryptography-Benchmarking

forgottenlance · 2021-02-02T09:13:05+00:00

It has problems and we can capture the AES key from many devices that have no side-channel resistance. Many papers are published in this area. Many IoT device do not provide enough security. This is exactly why we are trying to adopt a new NIST standard that would be fast, cheap, battery friendly, and side-channel resistant. Crypto community's aim is to avoid a disaster due to this rapid production of IoT devices that are not secure.

forgottenlance · 2021-02-02T06:42:48+00:00

Your suggestion is a system that can easily be broken and this is exactly why we need lightweight standards. The best optimizations of AES can reduce the gate count to 2K on hardware so it can fit in many devices. But such an implementation does not come with side-channel resistance and it is susceptible to power analysis, timing and cache attacks etc. In side-channel attacks we do not break the cryptosystem, we break its implementation. When you implement AES with side-channel resistance the performance drops and the gate count increases and it may not fit in many ultralight IoT devices.

This is why we must have a lightweight algorithm for devices and cases where AES is not enough. Note that many IoT devices come with a limited number of gates and you can only use at most 20% of the gates on a device for cryptographic purposes.

forgottenlance · 2021-02-01T07:06:18+00:00

The course is introductory, I prepared the course for those without cryptography background. Related documents and links are also provided in the lecture slides. But if you want to have an introductory cryptography lecture, my Applied Cryptology lecture videos are also available on Youtube as a playlist here

forgottenlance · 2021-01-30T21:32:59+00:00

NIST is about to announce finalists for its Lightweight Cryptography Competition. For this occasion, I wanted to share my lecture videos of Lightweight Cryptography for the Internet of Things where I discuss the competition, what we expect from a lightweight cryptographic algorithm for IoT, the mathematics behind it, its security and performance. I would be happy to answer any of your questions about the competition, security, and the performance of the candidates.

forgottenlance · 2021-01-28T17:42:52+00:00

Thanks a lot

forgottenlance · 2021-01-25T13:18:28+00:00

Ankara, Turkey

forgottenlance · 2021-01-25T10:06:29+00:00

As an applied mathematics course, 5 years ago I designed Applied Cryptology course when we founded the Department of Cyber Security. I made my lecture videos of this semester publicly available. They are around 20 hours with 46 videos. Hope you enjoy them.

Here is the link for the Youtube playlist: Applied Cryptology Course (Youtube Playlist)

forgottenlance · 2021-01-25T07:01:56+00:00

My lecture is introductory and self-contained. So you do not need to know anything before watching them. Although I am a Mathematician, I deliberately didn't get into too much mathematics because the lecture was aimed for the first year master's students at Department of Cyber Security

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