Cynic - Slashdot User

Submission + - CS Faculty and Students to Write a Creative Commons C++ Textbook

Submitted by Cynic on Wednesday March 20, 2013 @10:07AM

Cynic writes: Inspired by an earlier Slashdot story about Finnish teachers and students writing a math textbook, I pitched the idea of writing our own much cheaper/free C++ textbook to my programming students. They were incredibly positive, so I decided to move forward and started a Kickstarter project. We hope to release the textbook we produce under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license and sell cheap hard copies to sustain the hosting and other production costs.

Submission + - CS Professor Announces Run for VT State Senate on a Platform of Internet Polling (vermontelection.org)

Submitted by

Cynic

on Tuesday May 29, 2012 @12:36AM

Cynic writes: "Having read pretty heavily on the topic, weighed the pros and cons, and seen a few relevant slashdot articles, I wondered why an elected representative couldn't use online and in-person polling of constituents to decide the way he or she votes. Though we are living in the "information age" and have rich communications media and opportunities for deep and accessible deliberation, we are getting by (poorly) with horse-and-buggy-era representation. In the spirit of science and because I think it's legitimately a better way of doing things, I recently announced my candidacy for Vermont's State Senate in Washington County."

Submission + - Another New AES Attack 1

Submitted by

Jeremy A. Hansen

on Thursday July 30, 2009 @12:29PM

Jeremy A. Hansen writes: "Bruce Schneier gives us an update on some ongoing cryptanalysis of AES:
Over the past couple of months, there have been two new cryptanalysis papers on AES. The attacks presented in the paper are not practical — they're far too complex, they're related-key attacks, and they're against larger-key versions and not the 128-bit version that most implementations use — but they are impressive pieces of work all the same.

This new attack, by Alex Biryukov, Orr Dunkelman, Nathan Keller, Dmitry Khovratovich, and Adi Shamir, is much more devastating. It is a completely practical attack against ten-round AES-256.

While ten-round AES-256 is not actually used anywhere, Schneier goes on to explain why this shakes some of the cryptology community's assumptions about the security margins of AES."

Submission + - SHA-3 Second Round Candidates Released

Submitted by

Jeremy A. Hansen

on Friday July 24, 2009 @11:58AM

Jeremy A. Hansen writes: "NIST just announced their selections for algorithms going to the second round of the SHA-3 competition:

NIST received 64 SHA-3 candidate hash function submissions and accepted 51 first round candidates as meeting our minimum acceptance criteria. We have now selected 14 second round candidates to continue in the competition. Information about the second round candidate algorithms will be available here.

We were pleased by the amount and quality of the cryptanalysis we received on the first round candidates, and more than a little amazed by the ingenuity of some of the attacks. We thank all the submitters, those who provided analysis, those who provided valuable implementation performance data (particularly e-Bash, and the papers dealing with the effects of the AES round instruction, FPGA implementations, and working store requirements of the algorithms). We were also pleased and grateful (although not surprised) for the graceful and forthright manner with which several of the submitters took bad news, and confirmed attacks, or recognized the shortcomings of their submission. In selecting this set of second round candidates we tried to include only algorithms that we thought had a chance of being selected as SHA-3. We were willing to extrapolate higher performance for conservative designs with apparently large safety factors, but comparatively unforgiving of aggressive designs that were broken, or nearly broken during the course of the review. We were more willing to accept disquieting properties of the hash function if the designer had apparently anticipated them, than if they were discovered during the review period, even if there were apparent fixes. We were generally alarmed by attacks on compression functions that seemed unanticipated by the submitters.

There are still some details of a few of the second round candidates that concern us. We will shortly post a statement describing each of the second round candidates, the factors that we liked about the submission and identifying any lingering concerns that we have. Submitters of the second round candidates are invited to tweak their submissions to improve them if they wish, fix any inconsistencies, problems or shortcomings in the specification or source code, and submit them to us by Sept. 15, 2009."

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