Wired reporter Daniel Oberhaus spotlights how a programmer has solved the cryptographic puzzle that was used to ceremonially seal a time capsule of early computer history at the Ray and Maria Stata Center. The puzzle, which was designed by Institute Professor Ron Rivest, “involved finding the number that results from running a squaring operation nearly 80 trillion times.”
Fast Company reporter Katherine Schwab spotlights Duality, an MIT startup that is using homomorphic encryption to analyze encrypted data without decrypting it. Schwab explains that the “company’s technology could provide an actual solution to the data privacy problem by allowing companies to keep their data fully encrypted and still find patterns in it.”
Motherboard reporter Jason Koebler writes about how MIT alumnus Ben Adida has started a non-profit aimed at building a safe and open-source voting machine. Koebler explains that Adida plans to use “already existing, commodity hardware and open-source software to compete with the proprietary, expensive, and often insecure voting machines that currently dominate the market.”
Wall Street Journal reporter Eugenia Cheng examines how three MIT researchers developed the RSA encryption system. “The development of RSA cryptography shows how mathematics research done for curiosity’s sake can eventually become useful, even if it takes several centuries,” writes Cheng. “It’s almost impossible to predict what research will yield practical results.”
Steven Melendez of Fast Company reports on a new system from MIT researchers called Accountability of Unreleased Data for Improved Transparency, or AUDIT, which could help the public track police surveillance. “While certain information may need to stay secret for an investigation to be done properly, some details have to be revealed for accountability to even be possible,” says graduate student Jonathan Frankle.
In an article and accompanying puzzle they developed for The Boston Globe, Aloni Cohen, Sunoo Park, and Adam Sealfon of MIT’s Cryptography and Information Security group write about how bar and QR codes contain hidden messages. Cohen, Park and Sealfon note that the encoding scheme used in these codes, “allows not only error detection, but also error correction.”
Writing for The Boston Globe, grad students Alon Cohen, Sunoo Park, and Adam Sealfon explain the history of steganography, the act of hiding messages in other forms of communication, and provide readers with a puzzle to crack. While computers have taken steganography to new heights, messages are still “legible only if you know — or can figure out — where and how to look.”
Curt Nickisch reports for WBUR on the remarks Robert Hannigan, director of Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, made at MIT on encryption and privacy. CSAIL’s Daniel Weitzner says that he feels that the fact that both Hannigan and Secretary of Defense Ash Carter spoke out against mandatory backdoors, is “a really significant shift in the debate.”
During his remarks at MIT, Robert Hannigan, director of Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, called for greater collaboration between technology companies and governments, reports Tim Bradshaw for the Financial Times. Bradshaw writes that “Hannigan’s speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Monday came ahead of a proposed new public-private forum in the UK.”
In a talk at MIT, Robert Hannigan, director of Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, expressed his hope that “technology companies and academic researchers will find ways to let government investigators get into encrypted devices without creating broad ‘back doors’ that undermine computer security,” writes Brian Bergstein for Technology Review.
Hiawatha Bray writes for The Boston Globe about the talk Robert Hannigan, director of Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, delivered on encryption at MIT. Bray writes that Hannigan urged technology companies and governments to “develop a joint strategy that will provide police and intelligence agencies the data they need, while preserving the public’s right to digital privacy.”
Emma Woollacott reports for Forbes on Vuvuzela, a text-messaging system that MIT researchers developed to encrypt the metadata and content of messages. “Vuvuzela uses multiple servers instead of one, to give each message multiple layers of encryption,” writes Woollacott.
The Economist spotlights increasing concerns about how private consumer data is accessed and employed, highlighting the recent White House big data privacy conference hosted at MIT and Professor Vinod Vaikuntanathan’s work with homomorphic encryption.
Hollie Slade of Forbes writes about ProtonMail, a new secure email service started by MIT and Harvard alumni.
Doug Saffir reports for Boston.com on ProtonMail a new, high-security email service started by five alumni of MIT and Harvard. ProtonMail is incorporated in Switzerland and subject to strict governmental privacy protections, features encrypted data, and a self-destruct feature that deletes sent emails.