The public are largely unaware of the losing battle security researchers have been fighting against western governments for the last 30 years. Ever since the creation of modern cryptography, western governments have sought to undermine and outlaw its use and distribution. The tactics have ranged from subverting standards, in order to require short keys sizes (GSM[1], DES[2]), banning the export and publication of cryptographic algorithms (PGP [3]), and more recently creating back-doored cryptographic components (DRBG[4]).

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Back in 2013/2014 I was working on vVote Verifiable Voting System, which involved implementing a number of threshold cryptographic protocols. At the time there was very little by way of examples or frameworks to learn/play with threshold crypto. Recently I had some time available to take what I had learnt over those years, and since, and put together a library of threshold cryptographic protocols. The library is open source and written in Java. It is not intended as a commercial use library, more something for those interested in threshold cryptography, and fellow academics, to play around with.

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After many years of thinking about writing a blog I finally decided to do it. Primarily because I am increasingly finding that I have something to say about what is going on. The blog will focus on information security, privacy and electronic voting - the areas I currently do research on. There may be the occasional post about life as an academic and travelling, but they will be the exception not the norm.

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