The problem is not when, but since when The public-key cryptography that holds up the Internet —RSA and elliptic curves (ECC)— rests on two problems a classical computer cannot solve in reasonable tim...
The problem: to compute, you have to open the box When you upload your payslip to a cloud service so it can work out your income tax withholding, the server needs to see the numbers. It does not matte...
Email was designed in 1982 for a world built on trust: anyone could connect to a server and say “hello, I am writing from your-bank.com“. Four decades later, that sentence is still free to...
On 4 October 2021, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp vanished from the internet for nearly six hours. There was no attack, no power failure, no fire in a data centre. Their servers stayed up and their ...
You tap the card, the terminal beeps, and in under half a second it already knows whether that piece of plastic deserves its trust. No PIN, no signature and, in many cases, not even a call to the bank...
You type a message, hit send, and the text shows up on someone else’s phone halfway around the world. In between it has travelled through servers you do not own, across networks someone may be r...
Every time you open an HTTPS page, the same little miracle repeats itself in a few milliseconds: two machines that have never met must agree on a shared secret while a third party listens to the whole...
When you sign up for a service, the server should not store your password. It stores something that looks like gibberish: a cryptographic digest, or hash, of that password. The idea is a one-way proce...
Every time you open a padlocked website, your browser and the server run a handshake protocol: an exchange of messages that agrees how to encrypt data before a single useful byte travels. For two deca...
If you have ever shopped online, sent an encrypted email or made a bank transfer, your trust has rested on two acronyms: RSA and ECC. They are the algorithms protecting almost every encrypted connecti...
There is a problem classical cryptography never fully solved: how do you prove that you know something without revealing what it is? This is not about hiding a value behind a hashed password, but abou...
Almost everyone believes that digitally signing is encrypting the message so nobody can read it. It is not. They are two cousins that often get confused: encryption seeks secrecy; signing seeks what a...