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Questions tagged [cryptography]

Practice of coding and decoding messages, and the related science.

29 votes
3 answers
8k views

Did US prohibit the export of the mere description of a cryptographic algorithm?

A Wikipedia page says that in the US regulations were introduced as part of munitions controls which required licenses to export cryptographic methods (and even their description) What concrete ...
got trolled too much this week's user avatar
3 votes
0 answers
239 views

Do Russians need to disclose their encryption keys to the Federal Security Service? [closed]

Is it true that in Russia, citizens have an obligation to send copy of all of their private encryption keys to the Federal Security Service (FSB), even without receiving a specific demand? Update: ...
ArekBulski's user avatar
38 votes
4 answers
3k views

Is refusing to decrypt data for the police illegal in England and Wales?

I've been recently downloading PuTTY from the official page and I have noticed a message stating: LEGAL WARNING: Use of PuTTY, PSCP, PSFTP and Plink is illegal in countries where encryption is ...
MMM's user avatar
  • 1,888
15 votes
1 answer
527 views

Did the NSA pay RSA $10 million to make Dual_EC_DRBG the default in BSafe?

According to this article from Reuters Undisclosed until now was that RSA received $10 million in a deal that set the NSA formula as the preferred, or default, method for number generation in the ...
ike's user avatar
  • 4,960
10 votes
1 answer
44k views

Did John Nash decipher code from a large board in the Pentagon?

I was watching the movie, "A Beautiful Mind", in which John Nash walks into the Pentagon, looks at a board having codes and deciphers them. I am quite skeptical about the way the scene is portrayed ...
Vinoth Kumar C M's user avatar
46 votes
3 answers
5k views

Has it been mathematicaly determined that the Voynich Manuscript is not gibberish?

A post on the CthulhuTech forum makes the following claim about the Voynich Manuscript: Actually doing abit of digging and the view is very spilt those who feel its a cipher of some kind have shown ...
oosterwal's user avatar
  • 4,325
9 votes
2 answers
577 views

Can diabetics with pumps be killed from a half mile away?

Black Hat: Lethal Hack and wireless attack on insulin pumps to kill people Like something straight out of science fiction, an attacker with a powerful antenna could be up to a half mile away from ...
user179700's user avatar
30 votes
3 answers
3k views

The mystery of "Numbers Stations"

Source From NoiseAddicts: "Static. Faint voices. Seven slow, monotonous tones. A pause. Suddenly, you hear music–one of those wind-up songs played by a child’s toy. The melody repeats three ...
Oliver_C's user avatar
  • 48k
26 votes
1 answer
3k views

Does the NSA build backdoors into encryption algorithms?

There was a lot of suspicion around the design of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) encryption algorithm, which is not used any more for its lack of security, regarding the NSA's involvement in its ...
jazzdawg's user avatar
  • 471