FTC’s Voice Cloning Challenge
The Federal Trade Commission is running a competition “to foster breakthrough ideas on preventing, monitoring, and evaluating malicious voice cloning.”
Entries Tagged "contests"
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Bounty to Recover NIST’s Elliptic Curve Seeds
This is a fun challenge:
The NIST elliptic curves that power much of modern cryptography were generated in the late ’90s by hashing seeds provided by the NSA. How were the seeds generated? Rumor has it that they are in turn hashes of English sentences, but the person who picked them, Dr. Jerry Solinas, passed away in early 2023 leaving behind a cryptographic mystery, some conspiracy theories, and an historical password cracking challenge.
So there’s a $12K prize to recover the hash seeds.
Some backstory:
Some of the backstory here (it’s the funniest fucking backstory ever): it’s lately been circulating—though I think this may have been somewhat common knowledge among practitioners, though definitely not to me—that the “random” seeds for the NIST P-curves, generated in the 1990s by Jerry Solinas at NSA, were simply SHA1 hashes of some variation of the string “Give Jerry a raise”.
At the time, the “pass a string through SHA1” thing was meant to increase confidence in the curve seeds; the idea was that SHA1 would destroy any possible structure in the seed, so NSA couldn’t have selected a deliberately weak seed. Of course, NIST/NSA then set about destroying its reputation in the 2000’s, and this explanation wasn’t nearly enough to quell conspiracy theories.
But when Jerry Solinas went back to reconstruct the seeds, so NIST could demonstrate that the seeds really were benign, he found that he’d forgotten the string he used!
If you’re a true conspiracist, you’re certain nobody is going to find a string that generates any of these seeds. On the flip side, if anyone does find them, that’ll be a pretty devastating blow to the theory that the NIST P-curves were maliciously generated—even for people totally unfamiliar with basic curve math.
Note that this is not the constants used in the Dual_EC_PRNG random-number generator that the NSA backdoored. This is something different.
Cybersecurity Visuals
The Hewlett Foundation just announced its top five ideas in its Cybersecurity Visuals Challenge. The problem Hewlett is trying to solve is the dearth of good visuals for cybersecurity. A Google Images Search demonstrates the problem: locks, fingerprints, hands on laptops, scary looking hackers in black hoodies. Hewlett wanted to go beyond those tropes.
I really liked the idea, but find the results underwhelming. It’s a hard problem.
Hewlett press release.
More on NIST’s Post-Quantum Cryptography
Back in July, NIST selected third-round algorithms for its post-quantum cryptography standard.
Recently, Daniel Apon of NIST gave a talk detailing the selection criteria. Interesting stuff.
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Post-Quantum Algorithms
NIST has organized a competition for public-key algorithms secure against a quantum computer. It recently published all of its Round 1 submissions. (Details of the NIST efforts are here. A timeline for the new algorithms is here.)
NSA Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper Competition
Every year, the NSA has a competition for the best cybersecurity paper. Winners get to go to the NSA to pick up the award. (Warning: you will almost certainly be fingerprinted while you’re there.)
Submission guidelines and nomination page.
NIST Starts Planning for Post-Quantum Cryptography
Last year, the NSA announced its plans for transitioning to cryptography that is resistant to a quantum computer. Now, it’s NIST’s turn. Its just-released report talks about the importance of algorithm agility and quantum resistance. Sometime soon, it’s going to have a competition for quantum-resistant public-key algorithms:
Creating those newer, safer algorithms is the longer-term goal, Moody says. A key part of this effort will be an open collaboration with the public, which will be invited to devise and vet cryptographic methods that—to the best of experts’ knowledge—will be resistant to quantum attack. NIST plans to launch this collaboration formally sometime in the next few months, but in general, Moody says it will resemble past competitions such as the one for developing the SHA-3 hash algorithm, used in part for authenticating digital messages.
“It will be a long process involving public vetting of quantum-resistant algorithms,” Moody said. “And we’re not expecting to have just one winner. There are several systems in use that could be broken by a quantum computer—public-key encryption and digital signatures, to take two examples—and we will need different solutions for each of those systems.”
The report rightly states that we’re okay in the symmetric cryptography world; the key lengths are long enough.
This is an excellent development. NIST has done an excellent job with their previous cryptographic standards, giving us a couple of good, strong, well-reviewed, and patent-free algorithms. I have no doubt this process will be equally excellent. (If NIST is keeping a list, aside from post-quantum public-key algorithms, I would like to see competitions for a larger-block-size block cipher and a super-fast stream cipher as well.)
Uh Oh—Robots Are Getting Good with Samurai Swords
It’s Iaido, not sword fighting, but still.
Of course, the two didn’t battle each other, but competed in Iaido tests like cutting mats and flowers in various cross-sectional directions. A highlight was when the robot horizontally sliced string beans measuring just 1cm in thickness! At the end, the ultimate test unfolds: the famous 1,000 iaido sword cut challenge. Ultimately, both man and machine end up victorious, leaving behind a litter of straw and sweat as testament to the very first “Senbongiri battle between the pinnacle of robotics and the peak of humanity.”
Eighth Movie-Plot Threat Contest Semifinalists
On April 1, I announced the Eighth Movie Plot Threat Contest: demonstrate the evils of encryption.
Not a whole lot of good submissions this year. Possibly this contest has run its course, and there’s not a whole lot of interest left. On the other hand, it’s heartening to know that there aren’t a lot of encryption movie-plot threats out there.
Anyway, here are the semifinalists.
Cast your vote by number here; voting closes at the end of the month.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.