Research Blog

This article is an attempt at cataloging all the types of bitcoin transaction locking scripts, their prevalence and their security implications. The data presented in this article was lifted directly from the bitcoin blockchain, which required custom code to quickly iterate over the entire blockchain (over 450 GB at the time of writing). The tool […]

Six years ago, NCC Group researchers Tim Newsham and Jesse Hertz released TriforceAFL – an extension of the American Fuzzy Lop (AFL) fuzzer which supports full-system fuzzing using QEMU – but unfortunately the associated whitepaper for this work was never published. Today, we’re releasing it for the curious reader and historical archives alike. While fuzzing […]

This paper collects a set of notes and research projects conducted by NCC Group on the topic of the security of Machine Learning (ML) systems. The objective is to provide some industry perspective to the academic community, while collating helpful references for security practitioners, to enable more effective security auditing and security-focused code review of ML systems. Details of specific practical attacks and common security problems are described. Some general background information on the broader subject of ML is also included, mostly for context, to ensure that explanations of attack scenarios are clear, and some notes on frameworks and development processes are provided.

In this post we present a newly published key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) called BAT. It is a post-quantum algorithm, using NTRU lattices, and its main advantages are that it is both small and fast. The paper was accepted by TCHES (it should appear in volume 2022, issue 2) and is also available on ePrint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/031 […]

We present here a new construction which has no real immediate usefulness, but is a good illustration of a fundamental concept of cryptography, namely that there is a great difference between knowing that some mathematical object exists, and being able to build it in practice. Thus, this construction can be thought of as having some […]

For the past few years, NCC Group has been an industry partner to the Centre for Doctoral Training in Data Intensive Science (CDT in DIS) at University College London (UCL). CDT is composed of a group of over 80 academics from across UCL in areas such as High Energy Physics, Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, […]

Overview RFCs have played a pivotal role in helping to formalise ideas and requirements for much of the Internet’s design and engineering. They have facilitated peer review amongst engineers, researchers and computer scientists, which in turn has resulted in specification of key Internet protocols and their behaviours so that developers can implement those protocols in […]

This post is about some new (or sort of new) elliptic curves for use in cryptographic protocols. They were made public in mid-December 2020, on a dedicated Web site: https://doubleodd.group/ There is also a complete whitepaper, full of mathematical demonstrations, and several implementations. Oh noes, more curves! Will this never end? It is true that […]

Elliptic curves are commonly used to implement asymmetric cryptographic operations such as key exchange and signatures. These operations are used in many places, in particular to initiate secure network connections within protocols such as TLS and Noise. However, they are relatively expensive in terms of computing resources, especially for low-end embedded systems, which run on […]

In December 2019 we launched this new technical security research blog site. As part of its launch we had cause to revisit our old blog website and found a myriad of forgotten whitepapers and conference presentations spanning NCC Group’s history (formation in 1999). Deeply nested on our old blog site we found over 200 whitepapers […]