Global Reset

The full paper describing the recent attack on SHA-1 is now available online, according to Bruce Schneier. Previously, only an excerpt was made available, but this was due to some misunderstanding about the rules for papers being submitted for the Crypto conference.

Admittedly, it is early and I’ve only had my first cup of coffee, but the methods described in the paper don’t make much sense to me yet. Might take another cup of joe and one or two more reads.

If you feel up for it, you can give it a shot by grabbing a copy to read yourself.

Technorati Tags: Crypto

A whitepaper of mine that explains how the recent SHA-1 attacks from the Chinese research team don’t affect DalSemi’s SHA-1 devices was just published.

Whitepaper 9: Are SHA-1 Devices Still Secure?

After I got the edits on my original doc back from our publishing group, I realized that I have no freaking idea how to use indefinite pronouns. Or, at least, I use them in technical writing the same way I use them in conversation. E.g., I just used “them” twice in the last sentence. Apparently, that can be confusing in technical writing. If the subject is not in your usual conversational lingo, like it is in mine, it was apparently impossible to follow what I meant by “it”, “them”, “those”, etc… I had to re-write a large chunk of the document, in most cases restructuring paragraphs so that indefinite pronouns weren’t necessary. For example, I changed this:

“When reading from the SHA-1 memory devices, it responds with a MAC…”

To this:

“During a read operation, the SHA-1 memory devices respond with a MAC…”

Overall, I think the readability of the whitepaper increased greatly when I got rid of most of the indefinite pronouns. I’ll probably keep the original whitepaper I wrote and the editor’s comments right next to my monitor when I work on my next application note or whitepaper.