Archive for the ‘Cryptography’ Category

Obit watch: February 2, 2024.

Friday, February 2nd, 2024

Colonel Roger H.C. Donlon (United States Army – ret.)

Col. Donlon was the first person, and first Special Forces member, to receive the Medal of Honor for action in the Vietnam War.

His Medal of Honor citation:

Rank and organization: Captain, U.S. Army. Place and date: Near Nam Dong, Republic of Vietnam, 6 July 1964. Entered service at: Fort Chaffee, Ark. Born: 30 January 1934, Saugerties, N.Y. G.O. No.: 41, 17 December 1964.
Citation: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while defending a U.S. military installation against a fierce attack by hostile forces.
Capt. Donlon was serving as the commanding officer of the U.S. Army Special Forces Detachment A-726 at Camp Nam Dong when a reinforced Viet Cong battalion suddenly launched a full-scale, predawn attack on the camp. During the violent battle that ensued, lasting 5 hours and resulting in heavy casualties on both sides, Capt. Donlon directed the defense operations in the midst of an enemy barrage of mortar shells, falling grenades, and extremely heavy gunfire. Upon the initial onslaught, he swiftly marshaled his forces and ordered the removal of the needed ammunition from a blazing building. He then dashed through a hail of small arms and exploding hand grenades to abort a breach of the main gate. En route to this position he detected an enemy demolition team of 3 in the proximity of the main gate and quickly annihilated them. Although exposed to the intense grenade attack, he then succeeded in reaching a 60mm mortar position despite sustaining a severe stomach wound as he was within 5 yards of the gun pit. When he discovered that most of the men in this gunpit were also wounded, he completely disregarded his own injury, directed their withdrawal to a location 30 meters away, and again risked his life by remaining behind and covering the movement with the utmost effectiveness. Noticing that his team sergeant was unable to evacuate the gun pit he crawled toward him and, while dragging the fallen soldier out of the gunpit, an enemy mortar exploded and inflicted a wound in Capt. Donlon’s left shoulder. Although suffering from multiple wounds, he carried the abandoned 60mm mortar weapon to a new location 30 meters away where he found 3 wounded defenders. After administering first aid and encouragement to these men, he left the weapon with them, headed toward another position, and retrieved a 57mm recoilless rifle. Then with great courage and coolness under fire, he returned to the abandoned gun pit, evacuated ammunition for the 2 weapons, and while crawling and dragging the urgently needed ammunition, received a third wound on his leg by an enemy hand grenade. Despite his critical physical condition, he again crawled 175 meters to an 81mm mortar position and directed firing operations which protected the seriously threatened east sector of the camp. He then moved to an eastern 60mm mortar position and upon determining that the vicious enemy assault had weakened, crawled back to the gun pit with the 60mm mortar, set it up for defensive operations, and turned it over to 2 defenders with minor wounds. Without hesitation, he left this sheltered position, and moved from position to position around the beleaguered perimeter while hurling hand grenades at the enemy and inspiring his men to superhuman effort. As he bravely continued to move around the perimeter, a mortar shell exploded, wounding him in the face and body. As the long awaited daylight brought defeat to the enemy forces and their retreat back to the jungle leaving behind 54 of their dead, many weapons, and grenades, Capt. Donlon immediately reorganized his defenses and administered first aid to the wounded. His dynamic leadership, fortitude, and valiant efforts inspired not only the American personnel but the friendly Vietnamese defenders as well and resulted in the successful defense of the camp. Capt. Donlon’s extraordinary heroism, at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty are in the highest traditions of the U.S. Army and reflect great credit upon himself and the Armed Forces of his country.

The linked NYT obit provides a little more color. This was a wild battle.

Years later, Mr. Donlon said that among the fighters the Green Berets were training were many Vietcong sympathizers. When the shooting began, he told the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, the attackers made an announcement over a public address system in English and Vietnamese telling the sympathizers: “Lay down your weapons. We just want the Americans.” He estimated that there were only 75 dependable fighters to defend the camp.

He wrote two books. I think his first, Outpost of Freedom, was a pretty big seller at the time. We had a version of that in a “Reader’s Digest Condensed Book” at my house when I was a little kid, and I remember reading it pretty regularly. (That same Condensed book also had The Century of the Detective and The Yearling.) His other book was Beyond Nam Dong, about his post-war return.

In a 1995 return trip to Nam Dong, Mr. Donlon visited the overgrown graves of the South Vietnamese soldiers under his command who died in the battle. Beside him was Nguyen Can Thu, a former Vietcong political officer who had helped plan the attack. It was Mr. Thu, Mr. Donlon later said, who told him that 100 of the 300 Vietnamese he was training in the camp were Vietcong infiltrators.

David Kahn, cryptographic historian and author. (The Codebreakers.)

I read The Codebreakers (the original edition, the one with the key on the cover) when I was in middle school, and it was a big influence on me. I suspect there are a lot of other folks out there who can say the same thing. (Hattip: Bruce Schneier.)

Carl Weathers. THR. IMDB. Pretty well covered elsewhere, and I don’t have much to add.

Don Murray, actor. Other credits include “T.J. Hooker”, “Ghosts Can’t Do It”, and “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes”.

Jennell Jaquays, prominent D&D creator.

Over nearly five decades, Ms. Jaquays illustrated the covers and interiors of settings, modules, books and magazines for D&D and other role-playing games. In one of them, a red dragon roars while perched in front of a snow-capped mountain; in another, a nautiluslike spaceship floats above an alien world; in a third, two Ghostbusters prepare to tangle with a field of animated jack-o’-lanterns.
Ms. Jaquays also crafted scenarios of her own. Two of her earliest D&D modules, “Dark Tower” and “The Caverns of Thracia,” are renowned for their pathbreaking designs.

…

In the early 1980s Ms. Jaquays went to work for Coleco, and she eventually oversaw the teams that designed games for the Coleco Vision, an early home video game console; one notable project was WarGames, an adaptation of the 1983 film.
Long after leaving Coleco, when video games were vastly more sophisticated, Ms. Jaquays designed levels for the first-person shooters Quake II and III and the military strategy game Halo Wars. She also made The War Chiefs, an expansion pack that let users play as Native American cultures vying for power against European civilizations in Age of Empires III.

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“Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.”

Thursday, September 19th, 2013

There’s an interesting post over at the Cryptographic Engineering blog about Duel-EC.

For those not following the story, Dual-EC is a pseudorandom number generator proposed by NIST for international use back in 2006. Just a few months later, Shumow and Ferguson made cryptographic history by pointing out that there might be an NSA backdoor in the algorithm. This possibility — fairly remarkable for an algorithm of this type — looked bad and smelled worse. If true, it spelled almost certain doom for anyone relying on Dual-EC to keep their system safe from spying eyes.

The post itself is pretty wonky, but a couple of scattershot points:

Flaw #1: Dual-EC has no security proof.
Let me spell this out as clearly as I can. In the course of proposing this complex and slow new PRG where the only damn reason you’d ever use the thing is for its security reduction, NIST forgot to provide one. This is like selling someone a Mercedes and forgetting to attach the hood ornament.

Flaw #3: You can guess the original EC point from looking at the output bits.

Flaw #4: If you know a certain property about the Dual_EC parameters, and can recover an output point, you can predict all subsequent outputs of the generator.

…

This is a huge deal in the case of SSL/TLS, for example. If I use the Dual-EC PRG to generate the “Client Random” nonce transmitted in the beginning of an SSL connection, then the NSA will be able to predict the “Pre-Master” secret that I’m going to generate during the RSA handshake. Given this information the connection is now a cleartext read. This is not good.

Flaw #5: Nobody knows where the recommended parameters came from.

So does all of this amount to a backdoor? Quoth Matthew Green,

…including some kind of hypothetical backdoor would be a horrible, horrific idea — one that would almost certainly blow back at us.
You’d think people with common sense would realize this. Unfortunately we can’t count on that anymore.

(Subject line hattip.)

(You know, I’m halfway tempted to start a Kickstarter for a truly random random number generator. Something based off atomic decay, perhaps. What’s stopping me is:

  1. I have no electronics design skills or ability. Of course, I could hire someone, but…
  2. I’d be surprised if someone hasn’t already done this.)

(Edited to add: You could just get your random numbers from here, of course, while you’re waiting for the revolution. Nothing wrong with that plan, is there?)

(Speaking of Big John von Neumann, I just finished Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe, about the early history of computing, with a strong concentration on the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study and von Neumann’s work. It’s an interesting book – I think it serves as a good introductory biography of von Neumann. Dyson wanders a bit into the mystic towards the end, a little bit more than I would have liked, which prevents me from fully endorsing it. But if you liked Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship, you should enjoy this book as well.)

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