31–40 of 197 posts
The rest of society is not so courageous.
You only need to look at various management consultants, new age healers, and religion to find more people who obviously know nothing about how the world actually is, but are never held to account.
Interesting move trying to push snake-oil in a room full of SMEs.
Yeah, selling snake-oil encryption to a group of professional infosec researchers and cryptographers? Do they even a have brain...
Most bad or boring presentations are not called out publicly on several media.
The company has issued a "statement regarding recent allegations made at Black Hat 2019 [0]. For anyone interested, the statement links to the guy's paper [1] "where he identified the first Infinite Prime Number prediction pattern". > Utilizing multi-dimensional encryption technology, including time, music’s infinite variability, artificial intelligence, and most notably mathematical constancies to generate entangled…
Ignoring the reference to unrelated results about prime numbers, the main idea is that to check if a number is prime:
1) First check the remainder modulo 10, modulo 9 and modulo 24. This part is correct, but it's suspicious that they waste a few pages to prove it. Anyone with a minimal background will agree with this part explained in a line.
2) They make a multiplication table "Q-grid" of the number that are not multiple of 2 nor 3. The idea is that after discarding the numbers with the bad remainder module 24, the rest of the numbers are not multiple of 2 nor 3. Again, it's suspicious that they give a long explanation and the use of invented names like "Quasi-primes"
3) To test if N is prime, they try to find in this table build looking first at the numbers nearby the x~=sqrt(N) and y~=sqrt(N) so x * y ~= N. It's not clear how they lookup in the table.
Being very optimistic, this is essentially like searching for a divisor of N up to sqrt(N). [I'm not sure that their implementation is not worse.] This search up to sqrt(N) is one of the first trick you learn to test primality. The advantage of their method is that they reduce the search space modulo 24 and they get the result in sqrt(N)/3 steps. [I'm not sure that their implementation is not worse.] This is slightly better than using only the odd numbers to get the result in sqrt(N)/2 steps.
For big enough numbers to be used in cryptography, this sqrt(N) or sqrt(N)/2 or sqrt(N)/3 is complete rubbish compared to any modern serious method, it's not even funny, I understand the uproar.
Some quotes:
> And because when we search for the prime factors of some semiprime number we need to remove the non-prime numbers from both axes of the Q-grid, like 25, 35, 49 etc., the problem will automatically reduce to simply locating the number in the Q-grid, with its horizontal and vertical projections on both axes being its prime factors.
I hope they are not trying to build the whole Q-grid. It uses more memory than a simple search. Also if they are keeping only the prime numbers, why all the discussion of using the remainder module 24. All big prime numbers have the correct remainder module 24.
> In fact, these two numbers, 2 and 3, contradict many of the primes properties such that some mathematicians consider them as sub-prime integers.
I never hear that. Bad math joke: Did you notice that 2 is an odd prime number?
> Usually, talks submitted to Black Hat go through a thorough approval process managed by a review board of industry experts. But, as in this case, companies can also pay to play and get these sponsored talks, which are not vetted for quality. That just seems ripe for abuse like this. I'm surprised this hasn't happened before.
Do you think all the other products they pitch there live up to the promises made? This is just a bit extreme in its wording, so it's causing attention.
Snake oil for sure, but this is merely a snake oil sales guy who walked into a room full of people willing to call him out. The rest of society is not so courageous. You only need to look at various management consultants, new age healers, and religion to find more people who obviously know nothing about how the world actually is, but are never held to account.
The company has issued a "statement regarding recent allegations made at Black Hat 2019 [0]. For anyone interested, the statement links to the guy's paper [1] "where he identified the first Infinite Prime Number prediction pattern". > Utilizing multi-dimensional encryption technology, including time, music’s infinite variability, artificial intelligence, and most notably mathematical constancies to generate entangled…
I also suspect the guy (Robert Grant) is a conman, but whatever scheme he is running is quite elaborate: https://strathspeycrown.com/team Does anyone have an insight as to what their endgame is, and where their funding is coming from?
Having a team page like that is your first red flag. https://strathspeycrown.com/subsidiary-companies-investments... > "Strathspey Crown is a visionary portfolio of transformational businesses, focused on the most complex sectors of healthcare, energy, and technology." This seems to be the parent company, check out some of the goofy things they claim to been involved in. Quotes like "changing the paradigm", "the inte…
When your ‘director of cryptography’ has this in his bio, surely something’s up:
> dedicated the last fifteen years to decrypting mathematical codes in Shakespeare’s writings that have revealed unknown sacred geometry hidden in the pyramids of Giza.
Another of their companies sells patches that relieves pain through the magic of quantum physics. Something about the energies of healing substances that unlock a pain relieving carrier wave.
Yikes.
Why did Black Hat delete it, rather than making snide comments about it? A video of people laughing at the speaker would have been great.