This week on the Cryptocracy podcast we interview Karsten Nohl about his joint work with Henryk Plötz on their recent break of the Mifare proprietary cipher known as “Crypto 1”. We also perform a narration of The Pynchon Gate: A Secure Method of Pseudonymous Mail Retrieval by Len Sassaman, Bram Cohen, and Nick Mathewson. Download Episode 2 (VBR mp3) | Download in other formats

The program

• Announcements
• This week’s guest: Karsten Nohl on the Mifare Crypto 1 break
• Anonymity Bibliography Paper of the week: The Pynchon Gate: A Secure Method of Pseudonymous Mail Retrieval

This Week’s Guest

This week’s guest is Karsten Nohl, a Ph. D. candidate in the computer science department of the University of Virginia. Karsten was kind enough to speak with us about joint work with Henryk Plötz regarding their analysis of the Mifare Crypto 1 cipher. More information about the Mifare Crypto 1 (“Mifare classic crypto”) analysis including video footage of the 24c3 presentation is available on Hack A Day.

This Week’s Announcements

W2SP 2008: Web 2.0 Security and Privacy 2008 When: May 22, 2008 Submission Deadline: March 7, 2008 Where: Co-located with IEEE S&P, Oakland, CA, USA What: “The goal of this one day workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to focus on understanding Web 2.0 security and privacy issues, and establishing new collaborations in these areas.” Fourth International Summer School:

The Future of Identity in the Information Society – Challenges for Privacy and Security FIDIS/IFIP Internet Security & Privacy Summer School 2008 When: 1-7 September 2008 Submission Deadline: April 28, 2008 Where: Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Rep What: “The increasing diversity of Information & Communication Technologies and their equally diverse range of uses in personal, professional and official capacities raise challenging questions of identity in a variety of contexts. What constitutes an identity, how do new technologies affect identity, how do we manage identities in a globally networked information society?” 2008 USENIX/ACCURATE Electronic Voting Technology Workshop When: July 28-29, 2008 Submission Deadline: March 28, 2008 Where: San Jose, CA, USA What: “EVT ‘08 seeks to bring together researchers from a variety of disciplines, ranging from computer science and human-computer interaction experts through political scientists, legal experts, election administrators, and voting equipment vendors. EVT seeks to publish original research on important problems in all aspects of electronic voting.” If you are going to be in Barcelona in March, hurry up and register for PKC 2008: The 11th International Workshop on Practice and Theory in Public Key Cryptography. The late registration deadline is almost upon us, as it falls on February 13th. Tune in next week for an interview with Ian Goldberg, author of many great papers including “Improving the Robustness of Private Information Retrieval” which was featured on last week’s program. Anonymity Bibliography Paper of the week The Pynchon Gate: A Secure Method of Pseudonymous Mail Retrieval [Anonbib entry][Bibtex] By Len Sassaman, Bram Cohen, and Nick Mathewson Other papers mentioned in this week’s episode Security Analysis of a Cryptographically-Enabled RFID Device [Bibtex] By S. Bono, M. Green, A. Stubblefield, A. Juels, A. Rubin, and M. Szydlo

Acknowledgements