Privacy on billpg industries™

Vinegar - refined Vigenère - can you break my cipher?

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 16:32:00 +0000

I’m idly interested in cryptography, the art of scrambling a message so that it can be transmitted securely, and only someone with the magic key can understand the message.

When I was young, I designed a cryptographic algorithm. I thought I was so clever, but just because *I* couldn’t break it, that doesn’t make it secure.

In this article, I present my naive cryptographic algorithm. It’s very flawed, so please don’t use it for anything important. Can you find the flaw?

Google snooping WiFi? Don't panic! Don't panic!

Sat, 22 May 2010 21:40:00 +0000

Google have got into a bit of hot water when it emerged that while their cars drove around taking pictures for their Street View service, they collected and stored people’s private WiFi traffic. People have understandably got angry with Google for doing this, but I think some demystification is in order.

Did they collect my private data?

If your WiFi access point uses WPA with a good pass-key, don’t worry. Your network traffic is encrypted and is just noise without that pass-key.