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Establishing the Levchin Prize for Real World Cryptography

I loved math and puzzles for as long as I can remember, but my love affair with cryptography began when a fellow student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign let me borrow his many-times-xerox’d copy of the government-issued technical specification of the Digital Encryption Standard in 1994. (Thank you Dave B., I don’t think I ever returned it!). I was hooked, and even tried to apply to the NSA for an internship, but was promptly rebuffed because I was not (yet) a U.S. citizen.

Instead, swept up in the first Internet startup wave, I was dreaming up schemes to build a crypto-powered startup. Having moved to Silicon Valley after graduation, I started a company with a guy I met on Stanford campus, Peter Thiel, to do just that — build a company where security was the ultimate source of value creation. The company, which we initially called Confinity (for Confidence and Infinity) was soon renamed PayPal.

A less public guy, whom I also met at Stanford, is helping award this prize today — Professor Dan Boneh. Dan has been an invaluable helper, sanity-checker, and occasional life- (or at least company-) saver as we designed our security systems at PayPal, and in almost every other project I’ve since gone on to start. (In fact, Dan once helped identify and fix a very ugly software bug in the seed material collector for my random-number generator… instead of going to his own birthday party.)

Despite never having the patience to complete an advanced degree (which remains my science-minded family’s goal) in cryptography, its applications in the real world remained a critical enabler of much of my success to date.

So, in October of 2014, I invited a few friends, practitioners and experts in cryptography, to dinner, to discuss the best way to celebrate and promote applied, real-world cryptography and its applications in digital security, as well as aid in broader public awareness of the importance of both. It was that dinner where this prize was born and today,  I am proud to announce the first two recipients of the 1st annual Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptography.

Winner 1: Phillip Rogaway

Significance of contribution: Phil is a giant in the area of symmetric encryption. The prize is given for his groundbreaking practice-oriented research, authenticated encryption and his work on format preserving encryption which has had an exceptional impact on real-world cryptography.

Winner 2:  The miTLS Team

Significance of contribution: miTLS is a verified implementation of the TLS protocol. In addition to the implementation, the team also uncovered numerous mistakes in the design of TLS and mistakes in many implementations. Their work has influenced the design of many features in the upcoming update to TLS called TLS 1.3.

I created this prize because I believe technological innovation can improve electronic freedom, privacy, trustworthiness, and safety.  All of us use - and benefit from - applications of cryptography in our daily lives. More than anything, this prize is about drawing attention to the contributions of those in the field and recognizing that cryptography is very special field, in and of itself.

I hope that this prize encourages younger researchers – especially students – to think about how cryptographic principles can be applied to improve the many flawed systems of today. At a time when governments and corporations are scrambling to stem the rising tide of data breaches, cryptography has never been more important to the security of our economy and our personal privacy.

P.S. To read more about the prize and learn more about the honoree’s contributions to the field of cryptography, visit: levchinprize.com

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Shamir Secret Sharing

It’s 3am. Paul, the head of PayPal database administration carefully enters his elaborate passphrase at a keyboard in a darkened cubicle of 1840 Embarcadero Road in East Palo Alto, for the fifth time. He hits Return. The green-on-black console window instantly displays one line of text: “Sorry, one or more wrong passphrases. Can’t reconstruct the key. Goodbye.”

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Commencement Address

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Artist of the Moment: Janelle Monáe

Oooh La La! We really got a thing for Janelle Monáe.

The wait is over and we're officially in The Age of Pleasure so stream the new album right here.

We also dropped a custom theme that you can download here to make your blog look Phenomenal.

(interview credit: angie martinez)

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View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Janelle “Jane” Monáe (@janellemonae)

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View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Janelle “Jane” Monáe (@janellemonae)

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Ok folks. Everybody stay calm. It’s happening. Polls are here.

We’re starting to roll out a polls feature for the post editor across all platforms. Yes, that’s all platforms. That’s iOS, Android, and web. You should all have access to this in the next few days. And what’s more, it’s super easy to use.

Simply select the newly added orange poll icon (on web, it appears when you start a new content block in the post editor, on mobile it’s in your toolbar).

Write your question.

Add at least 2, at most 10 response options for people to choose from. There's a character limit on these, it's about as long as the Puss in Boots option offered above.

Set the poll duration to one day or one week. 

You can add some commentary to your poll or let it speak for itself. 

And, just as with any post, you can toggle who sees the poll by using your community labels. Or you can go wild and blaze it if it meets the content guidelines for blazing. 

Come across a poll in the wild? Have your say! Click on your chosen response. Congratulations, you’ve just voiced an opinion.

And that’s all there is to it. Have fun out there.

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testing again

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testing again

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⬇️ beyond this point are content that are only available in the npf editor ⬇️

like polls and community labels

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⬇️ next two posts are small uploaded gifs, with no tags ⬇️

legacy photo post

npf post; image has alt text

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⬇️ beyond this point are legacy vs npf comparisons ⬇️

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hello ???

hi ????