Cryptography is something of a cryptic field, if you’ll forgive the pun. While one researcher erects the walls of a new technique, another tries to smash it to pieces. Seemingly counterintuitive, near-simultaneous construction and compromise of encryption techniques ensures that only the fittest algorithms survive to safeguard sensitive bits.
Just for a read, I found it interestingShamir and coauthor Itai Dinur presented their "cube attack"—so named because of its basic form in three dimensions—in a talk last week at the conference. While a more-detailed paper is still forthcoming, Shamir and Dinur's work was the talk of the conference. And with good reason: Shamir is cryptographic royalty, having invented the RSA algorithm with Ron Rivest and Leonard Aldeman almost 30 years ago.
