An Explanation of the Meltdown/Spectre Bugs for a Non-Technical Audience
Last week the news of two significant computer bugs was announced. They've been dubbed Meltdown and Spectre. Here's the lowdown on what you need to know.…
Keeping your GDPR Resolutions
For many of us, a New Year brings a renewed commitment to eat better, exercise regularly, and read more (especially the Cloudflare blog). But as we enter 2018, there is a unique and significant new commitment approaching -- protecting personal data and complying with the European Union’s (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). As many of you know by now, the GDPR is a sweeping new EU…
How "expensive" is crypto anyway?
I wouldn’t be surprised if the title of this post attracts some Bitcoin aficionados, but if you are such, I want to disappoint you. For me crypto means cryptography, not cybermoney, and the price we pay for it is measured in CPU cycles, not USD. If you got to this second paragraph you probably heard that TLS today is very cheap to deploy. Considerable effort was put…
Why TLS 1.3 isn't in browsers yet
Upgrading a security protocol in an ecosystem as complex as the Internet is difficult. You need to update clients and servers and make sure everything in between continues to work correctly. The Internet is in the middle of such an upgrade right now. Transport Layer Security (TLS), the protocol that keeps web browsing confidential (and many people persist in calling SSL), is getting its first major overhaul with…
Concise (Post-Christmas) Cryptography Challenges
It's the day after Christmas; or, depending on your geography, Boxing Day. With the festivities over, you may still find yourself stuck at home and somewhat bored. Either way; here are three relatively short cryptography challenges, you can use to keep you momentarily occupied. Other than the hints (and some internet searching), you shouldn't require a particularly deep cryptography knowledge to start diving into these challenges. For hints…