by Dennis M. Ritchie, Bell Labs/Lucent Technologies
The C programming language was devised in the early 1970s as a system implementation language for the nascent Unix operating system. Derived from the typeless language BCPL, it evolved a type structure; created on a tiny machine as a tool to improve a meager programming environment, it has become one of the dominant languages of today. This paper studies its evolution.
Read the paper: The development of the C Language
by Marc Stevens, Elie Bursztein, Pierre Karpman, Ange Albertini, Yarik Markov
SHA-1 is a widely used 1995 NIST cryptographic hash function standard that was officially deprecated by NIST in 2011 due to fundamental security weaknesses demonstrated in various analyses and theoretical attacks.
Despite its deprecation, SHA-1 remains widely used in 2017 for document and TLS certificate signatures, and also in many software such as the GIT versioning system for integrity and backup purposes.
A key reason behind the reluctance of many industry players to replace SHA-1 with a safer alternative is the fact that finding an actual collision has seemed to be impractical for the past eleven years due to the high complexity and computational cost of the attack.
In this paper, we demonstrate that SHA-1 collision attacks have finally become practical by providing the first known instance of a collision. Furthermore, the prefix of the colliding messages was carefully chosen so that they allow an attacker to forge two PDF documents with the same SHA-1 hash yet that display arbitrarily-chosen distinct visual contents.
We were able to find this collision by combining many special cryptanalytic techniques in complex ways and improving upon previous work. In total the computational effort spent is equivalent to 263.1 SHA-1 compressions and took approximately 6 500 CPU years and 100 GPU years. As a result while the computational power spent on this collision is larger than other public cryptanalytic computations, it is still more than 100 000 times faster than a brute force search.
Read the full paper: The first collision for full SHA-1
La codifica H.265/HEVC porta con sé numerosi vantaggi, come il supporto a risoluzioni 8K, ma non viene ancora supportato a dovere dai Mac
Il successore della codifica H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding), H.265/HEVC per l’appunto, offre la possibilità di comprimere i dati in modo efficace, senza perdere di qualità, o la possibilità di supportare risoluzioni 4K e 8K UHD fino a 8192 x 4320. Tuttavia, non viene ancora supportato a dovere e richiede inoltre molte risorse per la loro risoluzione. VLC, che spesso ci viene in aiuto, ancora non li riproduce in maniera fluida e senza artefatti.
Ecco allora la necessità di convertirli in un formato più compatibile. Possiamo utilizzare FFmpeg a riga di comando:
$ ffmpeg -i inputfilename_h265.mp4 -c:a copy -c:v libx264 -preset slow -crf 18 outputfilename.mp4
sostituendo inputfilename_h265.mp4 con il nome del file H.265 nativo che si desidera convertire, e outputfilename.mp4 con il nome del file di destinazione che vogliamo creare in H.264.
Per chi non ce lo avesse già installato sul proprio Mac, è possibile farlo tramite MacPorts:
$ sudo port install ffmpeg +nofree
Il pacchetto si porta con sé molte dipendenze e a seconda dei casi l’installazione richiederà alcuni minuti.
