I am constantly updating this website with additional notes, as fast as I study and compartmentalize new information into notes and rules. See the (manually changed) Last Change at the bottom of the page, referring to changes made to this specific page. There are more subcategories to this category:
Cryptographic Summaries
List of Cryptography Equations INCOMPLETE
Symmetric Cryptography INCOMPLETE
“...so too will [this] seemingly minor discovery out of an arcane branch of mathematics come to be the wire clippers which dismantle the barbed wire around intellectual property. Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!” - Timothy C. May, the Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.
Public-Key Cryptography
“I've been posting my public key for 15 years now, but no one has ever asked me for it or used it for anything as far as I can tell. Maybe I should try posting my private key instead.” - xkcd.
Elliptic Curve Cryptography
“SEED = SHA1("Give Jerry a raise")”
- One of the seeds (or rather, something similar as the originals are lost) that was used to generate the ECDSA elliptic curve standard the NIST developed in the '90s (specifically, FIPS 186-2). A huge number of crypto-algorithms rely on this standard, such as the utterly ubiquitous X.509 certificates and even Bitcoin. Simply put, Jerry is embedded within the infrastructure of the internet, and is likely to remain so until universal PQC adoption.
Hash Functions & Digital Signatures
“The unknown message is: It's time to move to a longer key length”
- The plaintext discovered by distributed.net in the RC5-56 challenge, after 250 days of distributed brute-forcing through 34 quadrillion keys. This milestone, achieved on October 19, 1997, highlighted the limitations of 56-bit encryption and the power of distributed computing.
Message Authentication
“Trust, but verify.” - Russian proverb.
Key Management
“The next 120 seconds, are going to be very important for your life!”
- Christof Paar, inventor of Cryptography.
Post-Quantum Cryptography
“If computers that you build are quantum,
Then spies of all factions will want 'em.
Our codes will all fail,
And they'll read our email,
Till we've crypto that's quantum, and daunt 'em.”
- Peter Shor, Scientist.
