A couple of months ago, a new paper demonstrated some new attacks against the Fiat-Shamir transformation. Quanta published a good article that explains the results. This is a pretty exciting paper from a theoretical perspective, but I don’t see it leading to any practical real-world cryptanalysis. The fact that there are some weird circumstances that result in Fiat-Shamir insecurities isn’t new—many dozens of papers have been published about it since 1986. What this new result does is extend this known problem to slightly less weird (but still highly contrived) situations. But it’s a completely different matter to extend these sorts of attacks to “natural” situations...

Stuart Schechter makes some good points on the history of bad password policies: > Morris and Thompson’s work brought much-needed data to highlight a problem > that lots of people suspected was bad, but that had not been studied > scientifically. Their work was a big step forward, if not for two mistakes > that would impede future progress in improving passwords for decades. > > First, was Morris and Thompson’s confidence that their solution, a password > policy, would fix the underlying problem of weak passwords. They incorrectly > assumed that if they prevented the specific categories of weakness that they > had noted, that the result would be something strong. After implementing a > requirement that password have multiple characters sets or more total > characters, they wrote:...