6 ms·
Claude Shannon: The Mathematical Theory of Cryptography
- ShaneCurran 6y agoHi all, founder of Evervault here — we're building encryption infrastructure for developers. Cryptography is at the core of what we do. Evervault Papers is our way of continuing the legacy of cryptography giants like Shannon. We're posting one new paper on evervault.com/papers each week and this is our first issue. Subscribe to get a cryptography paper in your inbox every Thursday!
- sohkamyung 6y agoProviding an RSS feed would be nice.
- ShaneCurran 6y agoGood suggestion! We'll set this up.
- ShaneCurran 6y agoHey, just to follow up on this: we shipped RSS for Papers. https://evervault.com/api/rss https://evervault.com/api/rss Let us know if you've any questions/issues with it!
- LMYahooTFY 6y agoJesus that was quick lol. Great job!
- efxz 6y agoShane, I suggest You to focus on the product and customers, not on the papers. With < 10 people You can't do much, and I think personally You take to many tasks on Your own... Hire people and keep growing! Wish You success!
- betterunix2 6y agoCan you explain what exactly you do, other than saying that cryptography is at its core? Your website is a bit light on details. You say you encrypt data and can process encrypted data -- are you talking about TEEs, MPC, FHE, or something else entirely?
- ShaneCurran 6y agoSure! We build tooling that lets developers encrypt data before it hits their infrastructure (Relay) and which lets them process that encrypted data at a later date (Cages). We manage keys, but we don't store data. All crypto operations and encrypted data processing happens inside TEEs (AWS Nitro Enclaves, specifically [0]). Using Relay, you can pass data on to trusted third parties over TLS. With Cages, you can deploy custom code inside a TEE which can process data in whichever way you need. For developers who don't want plaintext data on our infrastructure, we also provide SDKs which let them encrypt data using our PKI scheme — on their own infrastructure. [0]: https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/aws-announces-general-availability-nitro-enclaves/ https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-det...
- betterunix2 6y agoThanks! I design MPC protocols for real-world applications and like to stay up to date on what else is happening out there.
- kyoji 6y agoI've implemented a toy version of a 3+ MPC protocol for graduate school, specifically private set intersection. Would you mind sharing what kind of MPC protocols you design and if you can for what types of applications? I don't often see this discussed on HN and my curiosity is piqued!
- betterunix2 6y agoTwo-party set intersection and variants (intersection-sum, etc.), federated learning (secure aggregation) and its variants, and several things that are not yet public. I also did some work on anonymous trust tokens, which is kind of like a generalization of privacy pass that is meant to replace cookies for conveying e.g. whitelist/blacklist information. For the most part my work involves companies doing some kind of statistical analysis of joint data sets while maintaining some privacy constraint. Some of the work involves analyzing ads effectiveness, some involves public health, some involves machine learning, and there is a long tail of obscure applications that were deployed as a one-off. Resource constraints are the biggest technical challenge, but a bigger problem I and the rest of the people I work with face is lack of awareness or poor understanding of MPC (people often assume it is just a variant of DP, or that it is a blockchain something or other, or that it is totally impractical, etc.).
- criddell 6y agoThank you for not making readers trade their email or sign up for a mailing list to get the paper.
- itcrowd 6y agoOn your homepage, evervault.com, you have an example of calculating the BMI in one of the images which is: > weight / Math.sqrt(height); In fact the BMI is weight / (height)^2
- ShaneCurran 6y agoAh, thanks for the heads up! We'll fix this ASAP
- edmundo 6y agoThat should be fixed now, thanks! Ps.: that’s what happens when designers code :P
- wombatmobile 6y ago“My greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it ‘information’, but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it ‘uncertainty’. When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, “You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, nobody knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.” — Claude Shannon
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- neonological 6y agoIt's true. Basically most people don't understand entropy. Both the scientific method and entropy are phenomenons arising from the assumption that probability is real. If you understand that entropy is merely a consequence of probability then you understand entropy. I think the thermodynamic law throws everyone off. Entropy is not the axiomatic law. The law is probability, and this same law also powers our science.
- st_goliath 6y ago> I think the thermodynamic law throws everyone off. Entropy is not the axiomatic law. The law is probability, Yes, and I think the other big plunder often committed is explaining entropy in thermodynamics as a measure for "disorderliness". You might get away with that if you want to explain diffusion processes to a class of high school students, but even then the idea quickly falls flat on it's face once they realize that in chemistry things crystalize out, often after giving off thermal energy. (Also, "disorderliness" is a fairly subjective concept)
- not2b 6y agoNo, that doesn't follow: entropy can decrease provided that it is exothermic enough. For a spontaneous reaction to occur, the relevant quantity isn't the entropy, but the Gibbs free energy. So reactions that reduce entropy (because "things crystalize out") can take place if the enthalpy increases enough to compensate.
- dwpdwpdwpdwpdwp 6y agoThis is a really good example of a paper that is both mathematically rigorous and actually readable
- diego898 6y agoI agree! In case you haven't read more Shannon, I *strongly* recommend his (probably) most famous work: "A Mathematical Theory of Communication"[1], where he proposes and solves many of the fundamental problems in information theory. [1]: http://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf http://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon...
- Isamu 6y agoThis 1945 paper was classified, the 1949 version was declassified. It is interesting to see his thinking around information theory influenced by the wartime needs surrounding cryptography. Bell Labs of course was involved in many wartime technologies.
- CliffStoll 6y agoJust look at the people on the routing list! Hendrick Bode (Bode Plot) Harry Nyquest (Nyquist Frequency) Barney Oliver (pulse-code modulation & founded HP labs) John Pierce (Pierce Oscillator & science fiction) Ralph Hartley (Hartley transform!) Walter Shewhart (Statistical quality control / Shewhart cycle) It was my honor to have met several of these people in sometimes odd circumstances.
- ShaneCurran 6y agoHey Cliff! We haven't met, but I'm the proud owner of a Klein Bottle (and a couple "Portraits of Gauss"!) :-) Thanks for reading! Some of these great innovators will be making an appearance in Evervault Papers in the near future. Stay tuned!
- CliffStoll 6y agoYikes! There's no hiding around here! I'm happy to see developers looking at security as pervasive: "everything encrypted" is important since an intruder may be inside the system. Or as Shannon wrote in this paper, "assume the enemy knows the system being used." (He then writes about the importance of key selection.) Warm wishes - Cliff
- lisper 6y ago> Yikes! There's no hiding around here! Not with that user name there isn't :-)