Secure communication is when two entities are communicating and do not want a third party to listen in. For this to be the case, the entities need to communicate in a way that is unsusceptible to eavesdropping or interception. Secure communication includes means by which people can share information with varying degrees of certainty that third parties cannot intercept what is said. Other than spoken face-to-face communication with no possible eavesdropper, it is probable that no communication is guaranteed to be secure in this sense, although practical obstacles such as legislation, resources, technical issues (interception and encryption), and the sheer volume of communication serve to limit surveillance.
With many communications taking place over long distance and mediated by technology, and increasing awareness of the importance of interception issues, technology and its compromise are at the heart of this debate. For this reason, this article focuses on communications mediated or intercepted by technology.
Also see Trusted Computing, an approach under present development that achieves security in general at the potential cost of compelling obligatory trust in corporate and government bodies.
In 1898, Nikola Tesla demonstrated a radio controlled boat in Madison Square Garden that allowed secure communication between transmitter and receiver.
One of the most famous systems of secure communication was the Green Hornet. During WWII, Winston Churchill had to discuss vital matters with Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the beginning, the calls were made using a voice scrambler, as this was thought to be secure. When this was found to be untrue, engineers started to work on a whole new system, which resulted in the Green Hornet or SIGSALY. With the Green Hornet, any unauthorized party listening in would just hear white noise, but the conversation would remain clear to authorized parties. As secrecy was paramount, the location of the Green Hornet was only known by the people who built it and Winston Churchill.
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In this seminar course students will get in depth understanding of mechanisms for private communication. This will be done by reading important papers that will be analyzed in the class. Students will
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Explores the practical implementation of security protocols using the biometric passport as a case study, covering vulnerabilities, TLS evolution, and ChaChaPoly encryption.
Cryptography, or cryptology (from κρυπτός "hidden, secret"; and γράφειν graphein, "to write", or -λογία -logia, "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversarial behavior. More generally, cryptography is about constructing and analyzing protocols that prevent third parties or the public from reading private messages. Modern cryptography exists at the intersection of the disciplines of mathematics, computer science, information security, electrical engineering, digital signal processing, physics, and others.
Tor, short for The Onion Router, is free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication. It directs Internet traffic via a free, worldwide, volunteer overlay network that consists of more than seven thousand relays. Using Tor makes it more difficult to trace a user's Internet activity. Tor protects personal privacy by concealing a user's location and usage from anyone performing network surveillance or traffic analysis. It protects the user's freedom and ability to communicate confidentially through IP address anonymity using Tor exit nodes.
A distributed hash table (DHT) is a distributed system that provides a lookup service similar to a hash table. Key–value pairs are stored in a DHT, and any participating node can efficiently retrieve the value associated with a given key. The main advantage of a DHT is that nodes can be added or removed with minimum work around re-distributing keys. Keys are unique identifiers which map to particular values, which in turn can be anything from addresses, to documents, to arbitrary data.
Many real-world group messaging systems delegate group administration to the application level, failing to provide formal guarantees related to group membership. Taking a cryptographic approach to group administration can prevent both implementation and pr ...
2023
Billions of people now have conversations daily over the Internet. A large portion of this communication takes place via secure messaging protocols that offer "end-to-end encryption'" guarantees and resilience to compromise like the widely-used Double Ratc ...
EPFL2024
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We present Epidemic Learning ( EL ), a simple yet powerful decentralized learning (DL) algorithm that leverages changing communication topologies to achieve faster model convergence compared to conventional DL approaches. At each round of EL, each node sen ...