80 Years of Computer History Lorrin R
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A History of End-To-End Encryption and the Death of PGP
25/05/2020 A history of end-to-end encryption and the death of PGP Hey! I'm David, a security engineer at the Blockchain team of Facebook (https://facebook.com/), previously a security consultant for the Cryptography Services of NCC Group (https://www.nccgroup.com). I'm also the author of the Real World Cryptography book (https://www.manning.com/books/real-world- cryptography?a_aid=Realworldcrypto&a_bid=ad500e09). This is my blog about cryptography and security and other related topics that I Ûnd interesting. A history of end-to-end encryption and If you don't know where to start, you might want to check these popular the death of PGP articles: posted January 2020 - How did length extension attacks made it 1981 - RFC 788 - Simple Mail Transfer Protocol into SHA-2? (/article/417/how-did-length- extension-attacks-made-it-into-sha-2/) (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc788) (SMTP) is published, - Speed and Cryptography the standard for email is born. (/article/468/speed-and-cryptography/) - What is the BLS signature scheme? (/article/472/what-is-the-bls-signature- This is were everything starts, we now have an open peer-to-peer scheme/) protocol that everyone on the internet can use to communicate. - Zero'ing memory, compiler optimizations and memset_s (/article/419/zeroing-memory- compiler-optimizations-and-memset_s/) 1991 - The 9 Lives of Bleichenbacher's CAT: New Cache ATtacks on TLS Implementations The US government introduces the 1991 Senate Bill 266, (/article/461/the-9-lives-of-bleichenbachers- which attempts to allow "the Government to obtain the cat-new-cache-attacks-on-tls- plain text contents of voice, data, and other implementations/) - How to Backdoor Di¸e-Hellman: quick communications when appropriately authorized by law" explanation (/article/360/how-to-backdoor- from "providers of electronic communications services di¸e-hellman-quick-explanation/) and manufacturers of electronic communications - Tamarin Prover Introduction (/article/404/tamarin-prover-introduction/) service equipment". -
Historical Perspective and Further Reading 162.E1
2.21 Historical Perspective and Further Reading 162.e1 2.21 Historical Perspective and Further Reading Th is section surveys the history of in struction set architectures over time, and we give a short history of programming languages and compilers. ISAs include accumulator architectures, general-purpose register architectures, stack architectures, and a brief history of ARMv7 and the x86. We also review the controversial subjects of high-level-language computer architectures and reduced instruction set computer architectures. Th e history of programming languages includes Fortran, Lisp, Algol, C, Cobol, Pascal, Simula, Smalltalk, C+ + , and Java, and the history of compilers includes the key milestones and the pioneers who achieved them. Accumulator Architectures Hardware was precious in the earliest stored-program computers. Consequently, computer pioneers could not aff ord the number of registers found in today’s architectures. In fact, these architectures had a single register for arithmetic instructions. Since all operations would accumulate in one register, it was called the accumulator , and this style of instruction set is given the same name. For example, accumulator Archaic EDSAC in 1949 had a single accumulator. term for register. On-line Th e three-operand format of RISC-V suggests that a single register is at least two use of it as a synonym for registers shy of our needs. Having the accumulator as both a source operand and “register” is a fairly reliable indication that the user the destination of the operation fi lls part of the shortfall, but it still leaves us one has been around quite a operand short. Th at fi nal operand is found in memory. -
INF 3190 Wireless Communications
Department of Informatics Networks and Distributed Systems (ND) group INF 3190 Wireless Communications Özgü Alay [email protected] Simula Research Laboratory Outline • Brief history of wireless • What is wireless communication? • Bottom-down approach – Physical layer : how can we transmit signals in air? – Link layer : multiple access – Wireless impact higher layers? • Wireless Systems – Mobile Broadband Networks – Wifi – Sensor Networks, Adhoc Networks 2 Wireless History • James C Maxwell ( 1831- 1879) laying the theoretical foundation for EM fields with his famous equations • Heinrich Hertz (1857- 1894 ) was the first to demonstrate the wave character of electrical transmission through space (1886). (Note Today the unit Hz reminds us of this discovery). • Radio invented in the 1880s by Marconi • The 1st radio broadcast took place in 1906 when Reginald A Fessenden transmitted voice and music for Christmas. • The invention of electronic vacuum tube in 1906 by Lee De Forest (1873-1961) & Robert Von Lieben (1878 – 1913) helped to reduce the size of sender and receiver . 3 Wireless History cont… • In 1915 , the first wireless voice transmission was set up between New York and San Francisco • The 1st commercial radio station started in 1920 – Note Sender & Receiver still needed huge antennas due to high transmission power. • In 1926, the first telephone in a train was available on the Berlin – Hamburg line • 1928 was the year of many field trials for TV broadcasting. John L Baird ( 1888 – 1946 ) transmitted TV across Atlantic and demonstrated color TV 4 Wireless History cont … • Invention of FM in 1933 by Edwin H Armstrong [ 1890 - 1954 ] . • 1946, Public Mobile in 25 US cities, high power transmitter on large tower. -
John Mccarthy
JOHN MCCARTHY: the uncommon logician of common sense Excerpt from Out of their Minds: the lives and discoveries of 15 great computer scientists by Dennis Shasha and Cathy Lazere, Copernicus Press August 23, 2004 If you want the computer to have general intelligence, the outer structure has to be common sense knowledge and reasoning. — John McCarthy When a five-year old receives a plastic toy car, she soon pushes it and beeps the horn. She realizes that she shouldn’t roll it on the dining room table or bounce it on the floor or land it on her little brother’s head. When she returns from school, she expects to find her car in more or less the same place she last put it, because she put it outside her baby brother’s reach. The reasoning is so simple that any five-year old child can understand it, yet most computers can’t. Part of the computer’s problem has to do with its lack of knowledge about day-to-day social conventions that the five-year old has learned from her parents, such as don’t scratch the furniture and don’t injure little brothers. Another part of the problem has to do with a computer’s inability to reason as we do daily, a type of reasoning that’s foreign to conventional logic and therefore to the thinking of the average computer programmer. Conventional logic uses a form of reasoning known as deduction. Deduction permits us to conclude from statements such as “All unemployed actors are waiters, ” and “ Sebastian is an unemployed actor,” the new statement that “Sebastian is a waiter.” The main virtue of deduction is that it is “sound” — if the premises hold, then so will the conclusions. -
Battle of the Clipper Chip - the New York Times
Battle of the Clipper Chip - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/12/magazine/battle-of-the-clipp... https://nyti.ms/298zenN Battle of the Clipper Chip By Steven Levy June 12, 1994 See the article in its original context from June 12, 1994, Section 6, Page 46 Buy Reprints VIEW ON TIMESMACHINE TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. On a sunny spring day in Mountain View, Calif., 50 angry activists are plotting against the United States Government. They may not look subversive sitting around a conference table dressed in T-shirts and jeans and eating burritos, but they are self-proclaimed saboteurs. They are the Cypherpunks, a loose confederation of computer hackers, hardware engineers and high-tech rabble-rousers. The precise object of their rage is the Clipper chip, offically known as the MYK-78 and not much bigger than a tooth. Just another tiny square of plastic covering a silicon thicket. A computer chip, from the outside indistinguishable from thousands of others. It seems 1 of 19 11/29/20, 6:16 PM Battle of the Clipper Chip - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/12/magazine/battle-of-the-clipp.. -
Zfone: a New Approach for Securing Voip Communication
Zfone: A New Approach for Securing VoIP Communication Samuel Sotillo [email protected] ICTN 4040 Spring 2006 Abstract This paper reviews some security challenges currently faced by VoIP systems as well as their potential solutions. Particularly, it focuses on Zfone, a vendor-neutral security solution developed by PGP’s creator, Phil Zimmermann. Zfone is based on the Z Real-time Transport Protocol (ZRTP), which is an extension of the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP). ZRTP offers a very simple and robust approach to providing protection against the most common type of VoIP threats. Basically, the protocol offers a mechanism to guarantee high entropy in a Diffie- Hellman key exchange by using a session key that is computed through the hashing several secrets, including a short authentication string that is read aloud by callers. The common shared secret is calculated and used only for one session at a time. However, the protocol allows for a part of the shared secret to be cached for future sessions. The mechanism provides for protection for man-in-the-middle, call hijack, spoofing, and other common types of attacks. Also, this paper explores the fact that VoIP security is a very complicated issue and that the technology is far from being inherently insecure as many people usually claim. Introduction Voice over IP (VoIP) is transforming the telecommunication industry. It offers multiple opportunities such as lower call fees, convergence of voice and data networks, simplification of deployment, and greater integration with multiple applications that offer enhanced multimedia functionality [1]. However, notwithstanding all these technological and economic opportunities, VoIP also brings up new challenges. -
The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix - IEEE Spectrum Page 1 of 6
The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix - IEEE Spectrum Page 1 of 6 COMPUTING / SOFTWARE FEATURE The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix The classic operating system turns 40, and its progeny abound By WARREN TOOMEY / DECEMBER 2011 They say that when one door closes on you, another opens. People generally offer this bit of wisdom just to lend some solace after a misfortune. But sometimes it's actually true. It certainly was for Ken Thompson and the late Dennis Ritchie, two of the greats of 20th-century information technology, when they created the Unix operating system, now considered one of the most inspiring and influential pieces of software ever written. A door had slammed shut for Thompson and Ritchie in March of 1969, when their employer, the American Telephone & Telegraph Co., withdrew from a collaborative project with the Photo: Alcatel-Lucent Massachusetts Institute of KEY FIGURES: Ken Thompson [seated] types as Dennis Ritchie looks on in 1972, shortly Technology and General Electric after they and their Bell Labs colleagues invented Unix. to create an interactive time- sharing system called Multics, which stood for "Multiplexed Information and Computing Service." Time-sharing, a technique that lets multiple people use a single computer simultaneously, had been invented only a decade earlier. Multics was to combine time-sharing with other technological advances of the era, allowing users to phone a computer from remote terminals and then read e -mail, edit documents, run calculations, and so forth. It was to be a great leap forward from the way computers were mostly being used, with people tediously preparing and submitting batch jobs on punch cards to be run one by one. -
John Mccarthy – Father of Artificial Intelligence
Asia Pacific Mathematics Newsletter John McCarthy – Father of Artificial Intelligence V Rajaraman Introduction I first met John McCarthy when he visited IIT, Kanpur, in 1968. During his visit he saw that our computer centre, which I was heading, had two batch processing second generation computers — an IBM 7044/1401 and an IBM 1620, both of them were being used for “production jobs”. IBM 1620 was used primarily to teach programming to all students of IIT and IBM 7044/1401 was used by research students and faculty besides a large number of guest users from several neighbouring universities and research laboratories. There was no interactive computer available for computer science and electrical engineering students to do hardware and software research. McCarthy was a great believer in the power of time-sharing computers. John McCarthy In fact one of his first important contributions was a memo he wrote in 1957 urging the Director of the MIT In this article we summarise the contributions of Computer Centre to modify the IBM 704 into a time- John McCarthy to Computer Science. Among his sharing machine [1]. He later persuaded Digital Equip- contributions are: suggesting that the best method ment Corporation (who made the first mini computers of using computers is in an interactive mode, a mode and the PDP series of computers) to design a mini in which computers become partners of users computer with a time-sharing operating system. enabling them to solve problems. This logically led to the idea of time-sharing of large computers by many users and computing becoming a utility — much like a power utility. -
The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix - IEEE Spectrum
The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix - IEEE Spectrum http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/the-strange-birth-and-long-li... COMPUTING / SOFTWARE FEATURE The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix The classic operating system turns 40, and its progeny abound By WARREN TOOMEY / DECEMBER 2011 They say that when one door closes on you, another opens. People generally offer this bit of wisdom just to lend some solace after a misfortune. But sometimes it's actually true. It certainly was for Ken Thompson and the late Dennis Ritchie, two of the greats of 20th-century information technology, when they created the Unix operating system, now considered one of the most inspiring and influential pieces of software ever written. A door had slammed shut for Thompson and Ritchie in March of 1969, when their employer, the American Telephone & Telegraph Co., withdrew from a collaborative project with the Photo: Alcatel-Lucent Massachusetts Institute of KEY FIGURES: Ken Thompson [seated] types as Dennis Ritchie looks on in 1972, shortly Technology and General Electric after they and their Bell Labs colleagues invented Unix. to create an interactive time-sharing system called Multics, which stood for "Multiplexed Information and Computing Service." Time-sharing, a technique that lets multiple people use a single computer simultaneously, had been invented only a decade earlier. Multics was to combine time-sharing with other technological advances of the era, allowing users to phone a computer from remote terminals and then read e-mail, edit documents, run calculations, and so forth. It was to be a great leap forward from the way computers were mostly being used, with people tediously preparing and submitting batch jobs on punch cards to be run one by one. -
Fpgas As Components in Heterogeneous HPC Systems: Raising the Abstraction Level of Heterogeneous Programming
FPGAs as Components in Heterogeneous HPC Systems: Raising the Abstraction Level of Heterogeneous Programming Wim Vanderbauwhede School of Computing Science University of Glasgow A trip down memory lane 80 Years ago: The Theory Turing, Alan Mathison. "On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem." J. of Math 58, no. 345-363 (1936): 5. 1936: Universal machine (Alan Turing) 1936: Lambda calculus (Alonzo Church) 1936: Stored-program concept (Konrad Zuse) 1937: Church-Turing thesis 1945: The Von Neumann architecture Church, Alonzo. "A set of postulates for the foundation of logic." Annals of mathematics (1932): 346-366. 60-40 Years ago: The Foundations The first working integrated circuit, 1958. © Texas Instruments. 1957: Fortran, John Backus, IBM 1958: First IC, Jack Kilby, Texas Instruments 1965: Moore’s law 1971: First microprocessor, Texas Instruments 1972: C, Dennis Ritchie, Bell Labs 1977: Fortran-77 1977: von Neumann bottleneck, John Backus 30 Years ago: HDLs and FPGAs Algotronix CAL1024 FPGA, 1989. © Algotronix 1984: Verilog 1984: First reprogrammable logic device, Altera 1985: First FPGA,Xilinx 1987: VHDL Standard IEEE 1076-1987 1989: Algotronix CAL1024, the first FPGA to offer random access to its control memory 20 Years ago: High-level Synthesis Page, Ian. "Closing the gap between hardware and software: hardware-software cosynthesis at Oxford." (1996): 2-2. 1996: Handel-C, Oxford University 2001: Mitrion-C, Mitrionics 2003: Bluespec, MIT 2003: MaxJ, Maxeler Technologies 2003: Impulse-C, Impulse Accelerated -
Introduction to UNIX What Is UNIX? Why UNIX? Brief History of UNIX Early UNIX History UNIX Variants
What is UNIX? A modern computer operating system Introduction to UNIX Operating system: “a program that acts as an intermediary between a user of the computer and the computer hardware” CS 2204 Software that manages your computer’s resources (files, programs, disks, network, …) Class meeting 1 e.g. Windows, MacOS Modern: features for stability, flexibility, multiple users and programs, configurability, etc. *Notes by Doug Bowman and other members of the CS faculty at Virginia Tech. Copyright 2001-2003. (C) Doug Bowman, Virginia Tech, 2001- 2 Why UNIX? Brief history of UNIX Used in many scientific and industrial settings Ken Thompson & Dennis Richie Huge number of free and well-written originally developed the earliest software programs versions of UNIX at Bell Labs for Open-source OS internal use in 1970s Internet servers and services run on UNIX Borrowed best ideas from other Oss Largely hardware-independent Meant for programmers and computer Based on standards experts Meant to run on “mini computers” (C) Doug Bowman, Virginia Tech, 2001- 3 (C) Doug Bowman, Virginia Tech, 2001- 4 Early UNIX History UNIX variants Thompson also rewrote the operating system Two main threads of development: in high level language of his own design Berkeley software distribution (BSD) which he called B. Unix System Laboratories System V Sun: SunOS, Solaris The B language lacked many features and Ritchie decided to design a successor to B GNU: Linux (many flavors) which he called C. SGI: Irix They then rewrote UNIX in the C FreeBSD programming language to aid in portability. Hewlett-Packard: HP-UX Apple: OS X (Darwin) … (C) Doug Bowman, Virginia Tech, 2001- 5 (C) Doug Bowman, Virginia Tech, 2001- 6 1 Layers in the UNIX System UNIX Structure User Interface The kernel is the core of the UNIX Library Interface Users system, controlling the system Standard Utility Programs hardware and performing various low- (shell, editors, compilers, etc.) System Interface calls User Mode level functions. -
Transnationality, Morality, and Politics of Computing Expertise
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Transnationality, Morality, and Politics of Co!"#ting Ex"ertise A dissertation s#%!i&ed in partial satis action o t'e re(#ire!ents for t'e degree )octor o P'iloso"'y in Anthro"ology %y L#is Feli"e Rosado M#rillo *+,- . Co"yright by L#is Feli"e Rosado M#rillo 2+,- A/STRACT OF T0E DISSERTATION Transnationality, Morality, and Politics o Co!"#ting E$"ertise %y L#is Feli"e Rosado M#rillo )octor o P'iloso"'y in Anthro"ology Uni1ersity o Cali ornia, Los Angeles, 2+,- Pro essor C'risto"'er M2 Kelty, C'air In this dissertation I e$amine t'e alterglo%alization o co!"#ter e$"ertise 5it' a oc#s on t'e creation o "olitical, econo!ic, !oral, and tec'nical ties among co!"#ter tec'nologists 5'o are identi6ed %y "eers and sel 7identi y as 8co!"#ter 'ac9ers2: ;e goal is to in1estigate 'o5 or!s o collaborati1e 5or9 are created on a local le1el alongside glo%al "ractices and disco#rses on co!"#ter 'ac9ing, linking local sites 5it' an e!ergent transnational do!ain o tec'nical e$c'ange and "olitical action. In order to ad1ance an #nderstanding o the e$"erience and "ractice o 'ac9ing %eyond its !ain axes o acti1ity in <estern Euro"e and the United States, I descri%e and analy4e "ro=ects and career trajectories o program!ers, engineers, and hac9er acti1ists w'o are ii !e!%ers o an international networ9 o co!!#nity s"aces called 8'ac9ers"aces: in the Paci6c region.