A few years ago, the school where I work decided to change its Alma Mater because nobody could remember the tune, and much less the words. There was a contests and, what do you know, I won (against very little competition, truth be said). Read on to see the words and hear the music of “IIT, You Mean to Me” (or, “IIT, you’re mean to me,” as most people sing it). Read More
Author: Paco Ruiz
Calculator-based cryptography
You think you need a computer to have a high-security code? Think again. I am about to tell you how to encrypt a message with as much security as you want, using just a common calculator. The name of this code is “root”, because the calculator’s square root key is what makes it secure.
Perpetual motion from light
Perpetual Motion Machines are those that would produce free, endless power, thus ending all of humanity’s energy problems (and maybe some political ones at the same time). I am not going to embarrass myself showing pictures of my early perpetual motion machines on this page, since you can find some very similar ones (guess which ones they are) going to this excellent website. What this article is about is a kind of perpetual motion machine that so far I haven”t been able to prove how it doesn’t work. Maybe you will…
Possible perpetual motion
What do you know? It seems there is a new kind of Perpetual Motion Machine, which would give free energy for ever, and Nature hasn’t managed to pass a law against it (just yet, at any rate). Read on if you’re strong-hearted (warning: contents under heavy math)…
PassLok in the UK
It is already illegal for a Briton to refuse to surrender his/her/its password to law-enforcement authorities, and Prime Minister Cameron is now trying to make all non-backdoored encryption illegal as well. What can you do if you are affected by this situation?
Modified interlock protocol for authentication
Of the many difficult problems dealing with public key cryptography, there are few so hard to crack as public key authentication. Public keys are easy to obtain (that’s why they are “public”), and because of this, it is hard to be sure that a certain key belongs to a certain person, what is known as authentication. Usually it is recommended that the key be handed out in person or that it be identified (directly or through a one-way hash) by a rich communication medium such as voice or video.
Lessons from the VIC cipher
In the mid-1950’s, the Soviet spy Reino Hayhanen, codenamed VIC, and his handler Rudolph Abel (in the picture) pulled off an incredible feat: they utilized a paper-and-pencil cipher that not even the FBI (the NSA wasn’t operating within US borders back then) was able to crack until Hayhanen defected and explained its inner workings. Computers already existed, and they were used primarily to crack ciphers like VIC. In this article, I go over some of its features, and how they can be used to enhance other simple ciphers. Read More
Aphids are those pesky green bugs that eat the plants in your garden. But here the name designates a high-security paper-and-pencil cipher similar to Restonia cipher
Paper and pencil ciphers are fun and can be useful in a pinch, when all computers around are suspect. In a previous article, I presented “Root,” a cipher that gives decent security and only requires a dumb calculator. In this article, we’re going to try and do the same without even that. Only paper and pencil. And you don’t need to learn Restonian. Read More
Remember strong passwords with this keyboard trick
Everyone knows that real people suck at coming up with strong passwords. They are either easy to remember and laughably weak, or decently strong and impossible
to recall. On top of that, it is highly recommended to use different passwords for different sites, so that compromising one won’t compromise the others. In this article, I follow Nobel laureate Manuel Blum’s recommendation of using not a password, but an easy to remember algorithm to come up with a way to generate strong, specific passwords for each site, and be able to remember them all.