Blog Archives: July, 2006
Updated site
If all has gone well, you should be seeing this blog entry on a redesigned site. I’ve updated the site to have a summer theme (as it’s apparently no longer winter). More substantially, I’ve changed the back end system that the entire web site runs on. I’ve moved the blog to a new program (WordPress). I’ve also improved the picture galleries so that they look much prettier and there’s a slideshow feature. Give it a try!
If you do discover any problems, leave a note for me here and I’ll try to fix it.
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Farley
Farley, For Better or For Worse This morning I came across the website for For Better or For Worse. My parents have read the comic for a long time, but I’ve only read it occasionally. As I was clicking around, I found the strips from when their dog Farley died after saving the youngest child when she fell into a river.
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All About Roundabouts
All About Roundabouts logo A few weeks ago, we received a brochure in the mail from the Region of Waterloo entitled “All About Roundabouts: How to Drive, Walk, and Bike in a Roundabout.” Perhaps it’s the snobby Brit in me, but I didn’t think using a roundabout was sufficiently difficult so as to require a brochure be delivered to every home in Kitchener, Waterloo, and Cambridge. Not only was I wrong that a brochure was needed, but there’s an entire website about how to use a roundabout.
Can-Amera Parkway Roundabout, Waterloo Region You really should take a few minutes to look at the website. It has a copy of the brochure that we received in the mail and a whole lot more. There’s a Flash animation that lets you see how different types of traffic (pedestrian, bicycle, motor vehicle) should use the roundabout for different functions (turning right, going straight through, turning left, doing a U-turn). There’s also a video of “actual traffic footage” at a local roundabout and a documentary about how to use a roundabout.
I shudder to think what would happen if we had a roundabout as complicated as the so-called Magic Roundabouts in Swindon or Hemel Hempstead. Of course, I also shudder to think about being in Hemel Hempstead, but that’s another story. (And I’m not the only one!)
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Side-Channel Attacks Paper
I have recently had a paper accepted to a conference. A paper I coauthored with Nicolas Thériault, a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research, has been accepted to Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES) 2006. The title of the paper is Unified Point Addition Formulæ and Side-Channel Attacks, and I’ll be attending the conference in October in Japan to present it.
The basic concept of the paper is as follows. In elliptic curve cryptography, you pick a secret key that’s a sequence of random 0s and 1s. Then you go through the bits of the key and if it’s a 0, you do one type of operation, and if it’s a 1, you do a different type of operation. Suppose that an adversary can observe which type of operation you do. Then they can figure out your secret key. How might someone observe which type of operation you do? Well, they might be able to detect electromagnetic radiation from your computer, or observe different power consumption when you plug a smart card into a reader, or any number of other ways. People have devised formulæ, called unified point addition formulæ, that minimize the difference between the two types of operations. We describe a way to detect differences in some cases, depending on how the formulæ are implemented.
If you made it through the paragraph above and happen to have any travel suggestions for Japan or China, I’d be happy to hear them.
