Cryptography and Security

Pada 4 Mei 2022, President Amerika Syarikat (AS), Joe Biden telah menandatangani sebuah memorandum yang antara lain mengetengahkan strategi negara tersebut untuk bersedia mengharungi era pengkomputeran kuantum. Komputer kuantum berpotensi untuk melonjakkan kemajuan dalam pelbagai bidang. Hal ini termasuk juga pemecahan algoritma kriptografi kekunci umum (public key cryptography) yang digunakan dalam kebanyakan sistem digital di seluruh dunia. Memahami ancaman tersebut, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) telah melaksanakan sebuah projek bernama Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) pada awal tahun 2016. Enam tahun kemudian, iaitu pada 5 Julai 2022, empat algoritma telah diumumkan untuk dimasukkan dalam standard PQC NIST yang baru. Algoritma-algoritma ini dijangka akan menggantikan algoritma kriptografi sedia ada seperti RSA, ECC dan Diffie-Hellman dalam tahun-tahun mendatang. Malah, dalam memorandum yang dinyatakan di atas, AS menyasarkan untuk melakukan transisi sistem k

This post is more about a note to myself about using OpenSSL in Visual Studio Code (VS Code). If the post benefits you, then I'm glad that it did. I performed all the steps described here on an Apple MacBook running macOS Big Sur 11.5.1. Before proceeding, we need to have these two programs installed: Homebrew : to install OpenSSL Visual Studio Code : the integrated development environment (IDE) I use to code OpenSSL. Of course, you can use any other IDEs that you prefer. OpenSSL OpenSSL is a toolkit that is able to perform SSL/TLS functionalities and execute cryptographic operations. There are two separate libraries: libssl for SSL/TLS and libcrypto for the cryptography stuff. Installing OpenSSL Use Homebrew to install OpenSSL: brew install openssl@1.1 On my Mac, Homebrew installs OpenSSL at /opt/homebrew/Cellar/openssl@1.1/1.1.1k . At the time of writing, the latest stable version of OpenSSL is 1.1.1k. If we open a terminal and type: openssl version the output will display Lib

The answer to the question posed by the title of this article is: It depends on the field and the specific conference and journals that we are referring to. In certain science fields, journals have more prestige than conferences. Articles published in conferences are typically not considered as "publications" when evaluating the annual performance of an academician. In computer science, it can be argued that an article published in a peer-reviewed premier conference proceedings has the same value as an article published in a prestigious journal. You can read Michael Ernst's (a Computer Science Professor at Washington University) opinion about this issue here (written in 2006) . In 2009, when Mosche Vardi (a Computer Science Professor at Rice University) was the Editor-in-Chief of the Communications of the ACM, he  wrote a letter to open up discussions wether conferences are indeed superior in computer science . In January 2020, he wrote another article related to this i

This is my personal opinion on how to write certain sections of a project including research and final-year projects (FYP) proposal. The following are sections that are typically required in a project proposal. Note that not all proposals strictly follow the structure described in this article. In Malaysia, however, when writing proposals for a Master/PhD research work, a final-year project, a research grant, the proposal's structure is similar to the one described here. Abstract According to the Oxford Dictionary, an abstract is a " summary of the contents of a book, article or speech ". Therefore, an abstract should contain a summary of relevant sections in your project proposal. For a proposal, you may begin with a short introduction, then to the research problems, objectives (what you plan to solve) and methodology (how you plan to solve the problems). The final report or thesis should include a brief mention about what you have accomplished (e.g. the solutions/findin

There are a few misconceptions about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, which I have read and heard people talking. Some of them are listed here and I shall try my best to correct them. This list will be updated from time to time. Referring cryptocurrency to just "crypto" . Technically, it is incorrect to link "crypto" to mean cryptocurrency. This is akin to calling "digital currency" as just "digital". I have read statements like: "I have a lot of cryptos". However, you don't say "I have a lot of digitals". So, it is better to stick with the term "cryptocurrency" as opposed to just "crypto" when referring to the former. Crypto is normally associated with cryptography . Bitcoin uses a public key infrastructure (PKI) . A PKI requires the setting up of an infrastructure involving, among others, a Certificate Authority (which is a trusted third party) that is responsible to certify public keys. In Bitcoin, or