Best of 2013

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2013. 431 posts.

Security & Privacy
395

Nice Security Mindset Example

A real-world one-way function: Alice and Bob procure the same edition of the white pages book for a particular town, say Cambridge. For each letter Alice wants to encrypt, she finds a person in the book whose last name starts with this letter and uses his/her phone number as the encryption of that letter. To decrypt…

406

NSA E-Mail Eavesdropping

More Snowden documents analyzed by the Guardian—two articles—discuss how the NSA collected e-mails and data on Internet activity of both Americans and foreigners. The program might have ended in 2011, or it might have continued under a different name. This is the program that resulted in that bizarre tale of Bush…

419

The Factoring Cryptopocalypse

The key detail to understand about the work in the Joux papers is that it is limited to solving discrete logarithm problems over fields of small characteristic . As interesting as the work is, mathematically, it should not be a great surprise to cryptographers: We've known for over a decade that small-characteristic…