Month: September 2020

A while ago, I got very paranoid about my computer being bugged, and so developed a series of paper and pencil ciphers that I published on this blog. After letting them sit for a while, my favorites from the bunch are FibonaRNG, a stream cipher seeded from three words which has formed the basis for the Human encryption mode in PassLok, and Snake, which achieves something close to the absolute impregnability of the one time pad by using a simple piece of text. In this article, I go through additional calculations related to Snake, and find that this cipher appears to be even better than previously thought. Read More

Yesterday a friend came to me in a rather vehement state of frenzy because people were getting spam from his email account. A quick trip to haveibeenpwned confirmed that, indeed, his email address was listed in recently discovered breaches. Fortunately, his password had not been compromised so the damage was relatively minor. But when I checked my own “low security” password that I still use in a number of places, the test was positive. This means that a hacker could just waltz into those accounts and order ukuleles that I don’t want, or impersonate me in some forgotten forum that nevertheless still has followers (including the FBI), and get me into a heap of trouble. So I decided to change all of those passwords and get it over with. Read on if you’re curious as to what happened. The picture should give you a hint. Read More