Design principles help students learn the essentials of technical design tasks. Students apply simple-sounding rules to achieve desired design features. The trick is to present students with design principles they can see in real life, understand, and apply in their own efforts. Here are my observations on how to write design principles to teach technical design. Many cybersecurity textbooks discuss…

This is a short, gentle two-part introduction to basic cryptographic concepts using text-based crypto examples. Illustrates encryption, decryption, ciphers, keys, algorithms, code cracking, cryptanalysis, and letter frequency analysis. Full disclosure: I produced these videos over a decade ago. Now they are hosted directly on this web site as opposed to elsewhere. Here is a PDF built from the animated slide decks: …

I found this in my files. I no doubt intended to publish it months ago and forgot to finish it and press the button. Senior government officials traditionally restrict defense-related conversations to special locations to prevent eavesdropping. The most secret conversations occur in places like the White House Situation Room or protected command centers in military sites. The officials also declare the conversation to be…

A person called me on the phone a few moments ago claiming to be from US Bank. He said there was some fraud detected on my account: someone created a new checking account with my identity information. "So, you have my identity information?" I asked. "Yes," he replied. "Can you prove who you say you are?" I got the first 3 words out before he abruptly hung up.

Journalists aren’t usually invited to online chats about US war plans. This seemed obvious until yesterday, when Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg published his article about being a lurker in…

It's all made from our data, anyway, so it should be ours to use as we want Opinion  Last year, I wrote a piece here on El Reg about being murdered by ChatGPT as an illustration of the potential harms through the misuse of large language models and…