Cryptonomicon Pontifex/SolitaireWe're back to my favorite book for another round. We've done quite a bit with Cryptonomicon so far. One of my favorite moments is when Enoch Root introduces a cipher that two prisoners used to communicate using just a humble playing card deck. Drawing of the mine in

A while ago, I explained in detail how to generate one time pad sheets and use them to encrypt and decrypt messages. It turned out to be doable, only requiring a pencil and a way to create random numbers, but it's slow, error prone and tedious. WhyThe one time pad

HashesWe did an implementation of a once popular hashing function in Part 8 on RC4 without really going into why. A hash function is any function that is used to map data of an arbitrary size (input) to a fixed size output. An algorithm is applied to the input and

RecapSo far we've Reversed a stringShifted bits left and right (mostly right)Brute forced a known simple cipherChanneled our inner John Connor by cracking ATM machinesSearched through a large number looking for matchesLearned how to use XOR to recover dataCreated a Linear Feedback Shift Register to generate better random numbersImplemented

RecapSo far in this 8 part series on doing weird things with Ciphers on old computers we've: Reversed a stringShifted bits left and right (mostly right)Brute forced a known simple cipherChanneled our inner John Connor by cracking ATM machinesSearched through a large number looking for matchesLearned how to use

So far in this 7 part (shocked I've made it through 7!) series on doing weird things with Ciphers on old computers we've: Reversed a stringShifted bits left and right (mostly right)Brute forced a known simple cipherChanneled our inner John Connor by cracking ATM machinesSearched through a large number

ReviewSo far we've: Reversed a stringShifted bits left and right (mostly right)Brute forced a known simple cipherFaked it, but then looking for a 4 digit known pinSearched through a large number looking for matchesWe now have most of the basic skills in Assembly to start doing some real work.

In Part 1 we did a simple reverse of a string. While simple, these software steps will help build the skills we need going forward in Assembly without feeling like I skipped right to a 300 line  after doing a short one. One foot in front of the other and

Sometime during my weeklong exploration of SHA-256 on a Commodore realized that there was a whole world of exploration that could be explored. Just because a Computer system is old, doesn't mean it's not interesting or useful. I had expected it to take months to figure out the SHA-256 implementation,