Financial Cryptography 2016

I will be trying to liveblog Financial Cryptography 2016, which is the twentieth anniversary of the conference. The opening keynote was by David Chaum, who invented digital cash over thirty years ago. From then until the first FC people believed that cryptography could enable commerce and also protect privacy; since then pessimism has slowly set … Continue reading Financial Cryptography 2016

Meeting Snowden in Princeton

I’m at Princeton where Ed Snowden is due to speak by live video link in a few minutes, and have a discussion with Bart Gellmann. Yesterday he spent four hours with a group of cryptographers from industry and academia, of which I was privileged to be one. The topic was the possible and likely countermeasures, … Continue reading Meeting Snowden in Princeton

Technology assisted deception detection (HICSS symposium)

The annual symposium “Credibility Assessment and Information Quality in Government and Business” was this year held on the 5th and 6th of January as part of the “Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences” (HICSS). The symposium on technology assisted deception detection was organised by Matthew Jensen, Thomas Meservy, Judee Burgoon and Jay Nunamaker. During this symposium, we presented … Continue reading Technology assisted deception detection (HICSS symposium)

Pico part III: Making Pico psychologically acceptable to the everyday user

Many users are willing to sacrifice some security to gain quick and easy access to their services, often in spite of advice from service providers. Users are somehow expected to use a unique password for every service, each sufficiently long and consisting of letters, numbers, and symbols. Since most users do not (indeed, cannot) follow … Continue reading Pico part III: Making Pico psychologically acceptable to the everyday user

How many Security Officers? (reloaded)

Some years ago I wrote a subsection in my thesis (sec 8.4.3, p. 154), entitled “How Many Security Officers are Best?”, where I reviewed over the various operating procedures I’d seen for Hardware Security Modules, and pondered why some people chose to use two separate parties to oversee a critical action and some chose to … Continue reading How many Security Officers? (reloaded)