Welcome to our regular weekend newsletter containing every remarkable story on networking and cybersecurity published between July 20 and 25, the year 2020.

As always, greetings within the latest cyber- and networking security newsletter brought to you by Qrator Labs. This time we are going to take a look at the most important and relevant stories published between July 13 and 18 of the year 2020.

Hello and welcome to our weekly recap of the news and articles worth attention on the topics of networking and cybersecurity published July 6 to 11, 2020.

Ladies and gentlemen, after a short vacation, we are back with the most relevant and essential news on cyber and network security.

This time we are going to make the 2-week overview, covering stories published roughly from June 22 to July 4. Enjoy!

Here we are again with the newest information on what happened in cyber and network security from June 15 to June 20. There has been a lot of events, so let's roll with the most critical ones.

Wow, that's been a week! Here's the blogpost copying our newsletter that covers all the newest information on what happened in cyber and network security from June 8 to June 13.

“In 1665, Cambridge University closed because of the plague. Issac Newton decided to work from home. He discovered calculus & the laws of motion.”

We live in a truly remarkable moment. With the year 2020 and the COVID-19 outbreak employees all over the world are staying home for quarantine, trying their best to sustain the normal flow of life, which means continue working. And this is something new compared to all the previous infectious pandemics humanity has survived through — this time we have the Internet.

tl;dr

github.com/QratorLabs/fastenum

pip install fast-enum

What are enums

(If you think you know that — scroll down to the “Enums in Standard Library” section).

Imagine that you need to describe a set of all possible states for the entities in your database model. You'll probably use a bunch of constants defined as module-level attributes:

# /path/to/package/static.py:
INITIAL = 0
PROCESSING = 1
PROCESSED = 2
DECLINED = 3
RETURNED = 4
...

...or as class-level attributes defined in their own class:

class MyModelStates:
INITIAL = 0
PROCESSING = 1
PROCESSED = 2
DECLINED = 3
RETURNED = 4

That helps you refer to those states by their mnemonic names, while they persist in your storage as simple integers. By this, you get rid of magic numbers scattered through your code and make it more readable and self-descriptive.

But, both the module-level constant and the class with the static attributes suffer from the inherent nature of python objects: they are all mutable. You may accidentally assign a value to your constant at runtime, and that is a mess to debug and rollback your broken entities. So, you might want to make your set of constants immutable, which means both the number of constants declared and the values they are mapped to must not be modified at runtime.

A couple of reader alerts:

In order to (somewhat) simplify the description process and tighten the volume of the article we are going to write, it is essential to make a significant remark and state the primary constraint right away — everything we are going to tell you today on the practical side of the problematics is viable only in terms of TLS 1.3. Meaning that while your ECDSA certificate would still work in TLS 1.2 if you wish it worked, providing backwards compatibility, the description of the actual handshake process, cipher suits and client-server benchmarks covers TLS 1.3 only. Of course, this does not relate to the mathematical description of algorithms behind modern encryption systems.

This article was written by neither a mathematician nor an engineer — although those helped to find a way around scary math and reviewed this article. Many thanks to Qrator Labs employees.

(Elliptic Curve) Diffie-Hellman (Ephemeral)

The Diffie–Hellman legacy in the 21 century

Of course, this has started with neither Diffie nor Hellman. But to provide a correct timeline, we need to point out main dates and events.

There were several major personas in the development of modern cryptography. Most notably, Alan Turing and Claud Shannon both laid an incredible amount of work over the field of theory of computation and information theory as well as general cryptanalysis, and both Diffie and Hellman, are officially credited for coming up with the idea of public-key (or so-called asymmetric) cryptography (although it is known that in the UK there were made serious advances in cryptography that stayed under secrecy for a very long time), making those two gentlemen pioneers.

In what exactly?