Cryptographic

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica: Researchers detail an unpatchable vulnerability in Apple's M-series of chips that lets attackers extract secret keys from Macs during cryptographic operations — Fixing newly discovered side channel will likely take a major toll on performance. — A newly discovered vulnerability baked … Dan Goodin / Ars Technica: Researchers detail an unpatchable vulnerability in Apple's M-series of chips that lets attackers extract secret keys from Macs during…

A cryptographic tag developed at MIT uses terahertz waves to authenticate items by recognizing the unique pattern of microscopic metal particles that are mixed into the glue that sticks the tag to the item’s surface. Credit: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT. Chip courtesy of the researchersMIT engineers developed a tag that can reveal with near-perfect accuracy whether an item is real or fake. The key is in the glue on the back of the tag.A few years ago, MIT researchers invented a cryptographic ID tag that is several times…

Silence Laboratories, a startup that builds infrastructure using multiparty computation (MPC) to help enterprises keep data private and safe, said it has raised a $4.1 million funding round. Pi Ventures and Kira Studio co-led the recent funding, which brings its total raised to $6 million, along with angel investors. The startup will use the funding to scale its teams and beef up its R&D pipeline. The startup’s infrastructure uses MPC, a subset of cryptography, which enables two or more…

Trust but verify. That expression captures the tension between relying on others while still wanting to keep some level of control over a situation. Mathematician Adi Shamir must have thought about this challenge when he developed what is now known as “Shamir’s secret sharing,” an algorithm named after him.To understand it, the following puzzle can help: Suppose an elderly woman wants to bequeath the contents of her safe, which is secured with a combination lock, to her five sons, but she is suspicious of each of them.…

Welcome back to Chain Reaction, a podcast that interviews newsmakers in crypto to better understand the tech behind the hype and the people working to build a decentralized future. For this week’s episode, Jacquelyn interviewed Sergey Nazarov, co-founder of Chainlink, a protocol that provides an oracle network to power smart contracts. “Oracle networks are really the thing that puts the word ‘smart’ in smart contracts,” Nazarov said. “Smart contracts in and of themselves don’t know what time it is; they don’t have…

Lawyers for Craig Wright, the Australian computer scientist best known for claiming to be the inventor of Bitcoin, said he will not provide any new cryptographic proof that he is Satoshi Nakamoto during his trial against bitcoiner Hodlonaut. The trial kicked off here on Monday. The Norwegian trial is one of two simultaneous lawsuits centered around a series of tweets from March 2019 in which Hodlonaut expressed doubt about Wright’s claims to be Satoshi, and called him a “fraud” and a “scammer.” Hodlonaut, known in real…

Adi Shamir’s Secret Sharing* is a cryptographic algorithm that allows distinct parties to jointly share ownership of a single secret by holding *shares*. The original secret can only be reconstructed by using a minimum number of shares, which allows different parties to cooperate without the need to fully trust one another. The family creates four shares and sets a threshold of three, with the Bitcoin key as the original secret. Every Shamir sharing scheme has a total of shares and a threshold.Lane WagnerFounder of…