Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

August 7, 2022

Winamp is back in action (!) after 9 years of no releases

Filed under: Computer Software,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:59 PM

Anyone who was using computers in the late 90’s and 2000’s knows that the best MP3 player of all time was Winamp, it really whips the llama’s ass. First released back in 1997, it spread like wildfire. I used it as my primary music player till I switched to Linux and even then I used a player that was skinned to look and work like Winamp.

Development for the player was paused back in 2013 and then resumed in 2018. It took 4 years of hard work and the Winamp 5.9 Release Candidate 1 is now available for download. Most of the changes in this version as in the backend as the code was migrated from Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2019. This modernizes the whole setup and the next release will focus on new features.

The only downside of this is that it is not available for Linux so I still have to use some other software rather than the original. I wonder if it would work over Wine/Crossover? If so then that would be awesome. Let me go try that out and see if that works (I will update this post if it actually works).

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

Update (8/8/2022): It Works on Linux! I downloaded and installed the latest RC on Linux using Crossover and it works flawlessly. (Although the preset names are in Chinese for some reason)

– Suramya

August 6, 2022

Post Quantum Encryption: Another candidate algorithm (SIKE) bites the dust

Filed under: Computer Security,Computer Software,Quantum Computing — Suramya @ 8:23 PM

Quantum Computing has the potential to make the current encryption algorithms obsolete once it gets around to actually being implemented on a large scale. But the Cryptographic experts in charge of such things have been working on Post Quantum Cryptography/Post Quantum Encryption (PQE) over the past few years to offset this risk. SIKE was one of KEM algorithms that advanced to the fourth round earlier this year and it was considered as an attractive candidate for standardization because of its small key and ciphertext sizes.

Unfortunately while that is true researchers have found that the algorithm is badly broken. Researchers from the Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography group at KU Leuven published a paper over the weekend “An Efficient Key Recovery Attack on SIDH” (Preliminary Version) that describes a technique which allows an attacker to recover the encryption keys protecting the SIKE Protected transactions in under an hours time using a single traditional PC. Since the whole idea behind PQE was to identify algorithms that are stronger than the traditional ones this immediately disqualifies SIKE from further consideration.

Abstract. We present an efficient key recovery attack on the Supersingular Isogeny Diffie–Hellman protocol (SIDH), based on a “glue-and-split” theorem due to Kani. Our attack exploits the existence of a small non-scalar endomorphism on the starting curve, and it also relies on the auxiliary torsion point information that Alice and Bob share during the protocol. Our Magma implementation breaks the instantiation SIKEp434, which aims at security level 1 of the Post-Quantum Cryptography standardization process currently ran by NIST, in about one hour on a single core.

The attack exploits the fact that SIDH has auxiliary points and that the degree of the secret isogeny is known. The auxiliary points in SIDH have always been an annoyance and a potential weakness, and they have been exploited for fault attacks, the GPST adaptive attack, torsion point attacks, etc.

This is not a bad thing as the whole testing and validation process is supposed to weed out weak algorithms and it is better to have them identified and removed now than after their release as then it becomes almost impossible to phase out systems that use the broken/compromised encryption algorithms.

Source: Schneier on Security: SIKE Broken

– Suramya

August 5, 2022

Happy to report that I have successfully cleared the Certified Network Defender exam

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 4:42 PM

I am really happy to report that I have cleared my Certified Network Defender exam. This is the second Cyber Security certification that I have done (I have 3 more pending) as they were included in my Cyber Security degree. It was a lot more interesting and had less stuff to memorize than the CSA exam but required a lot more study.


Certification Number Certification Name Issue Date Expiry Date
ECC1609574283 Certified Network Defender July 28, 2022 July 27, 2025

I will be completing the rest of the certifications shortly. Well this is all for now, will write more later.

– Suramya

– Suramya

August 4, 2022

Microsoft needs to fix their Windows registration/Activation system as it doesn’t work

Filed under: My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 11:59 PM

A lot of people claim that Windows is easier to use than Linux and I think that is because they never had to install windows on their system as it is almost always preinstalled. Based on my experience it feels like Microsoft is almost trying to make sure that people pirate their software because their systems suck, especially their license activation process. Over the past few months I have spent almost 48+ hours trying to get my installation of Windows to accept my Windows Pro license key that is part of my MS account and yesterday I spent 6.3 hours on call with their support with absolutely nothing to show for it.

Some background, I purchased a license for Windows 10 Pro back in 2020 so that I have a fully functional windows system that I can use for my Testing and research. This was the second license key that I purchased for Windows 10 because the previous one I had that I got from Amazon was locked to my old computer and as per the support there was no way to migrate to a new system as it was not purchased from MS directly (Which is very strange and doesn’t make sense at all). So, they told me that I needed to get the license from their online store so that it would be associated with my MS account and that way it could be moved to a new computer without issues. (Yeah right!)

I got the license, used it on my old system for a bit and then switched to a new laptop. I unregistered the key from the old laptop and tried registering it on the new laptop. It absolutely refused to work. Even though it was connected to my MS Account and the license was being validated using the digital license it was still working as a Windows Home Single user.

Spoke to the support and while they were super nice they couldn’t solve the issue. We tried reinstalling, upgrading, other license keys but nothing worked. Got escalated to senior folks but same issue. I had just about given up and was actually considering just downloading a pirated copy as that would be easier to install when I thought I should give it one last try. So I reinstalled Windows again and then didn’t connect it to my online account, instead I tried changing the product key using the key given to me by the support team to upgrade and that finally worked. My copy of Windows finally was upgraded to Windows Pro. After that the system upgraded to the latest version that took forever and a ton of reboots.

The same issue is there in their other software, MS Teams refuses to open when you click on a meeting link in Firefox on your mobile, but when I copy the same like to Chrome it works. Why do I have to use Chrome when all it is doing is launching a native application when I click on the link. Other applications like Zoom, GotoMeeting etc manage to do this without issues, but MS with their super smart team of people have hard coded it to work only with Chrome/Edge. LinkedIn is another major mess and I will post about it in a different post as that is a long story as well.

You need to make it easy for users to install/register licensed software else if using pirated software is easier/faster then people will just use that. I mostly use open source products along with a few Linux licensed software but they are so much easier to use/register.

In any case I now have a licensed version of Windows Pro running after wasting days of my life trying to get it to work. Ask any end use to do registration and then they will feel differently about how easy Windows is to use.

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

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