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Title    Alleged "Snake Oil" Crypto Company Sues Over Boos at Black Hat
Date    Saturday August 24 2019, @05:12AM
Author    martyb
Topic   
from the what-the-factoring dept.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/08/24/0021202

DannyB writes:

From ArsTechnica . . .

Alleged "Snake Oil" Crypto Company Sues Over Boos at Black Hat:

Grant's presentation, entitled "Discovery of Quasi-Prime Numbers: What Does this Mean for Encryption," was based on a paper called "Accurate and Infinite Prime Prediction from a Novel Quasi-PrimeAnalytical Methodology." That work was published in March of 2019 through Cornell University's arXiv.org by Grant's co-author Talal Ghannam—a physicist who has self-published a book called The Mystery of Numbers: Revealed through their Digital Root as well as a comic book called The Chronicles of Maroof the Knight: The Byzantine. The paper, a slim five pages, focuses on the use of digital root analysis (a type of calculation that has been used in occult numerology) to rapidly identify prime numbers and a sort of multiplication table for factoring primes.

[...] The Black Hat talk did not go smoothly. People had to be ejected from the room by security because they were heckling and booing Grant.

[...] Cryptographers were extremely skeptical, with some referring to the talk as "snake oil crypto." Even before the event, Mark Carney, a PhD candidate at the University of Leeds, wrote a paper refuting the claims Grant and Ghannam had made in theirs.

Well that could have gone better. Maybe the court trial will be more orderly.


Original Submission

Links

  1. "DannyB" - https://soylentnews.org/~DannyB/
  2. "ArsTechnica" - https://arstechnica.com/
  3. "Alleged "Snake Oil" Crypto Company Sues Over Boos at Black Hat" - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/08/company-accused-of-crypto-snake-oil-sues-black-hat-anonymous-detractors/
  4. ""Accurate and Infinite Prime Prediction from a Novel Quasi-PrimeAnalytical Methodology."" - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.08570.pdf
  5. "some referring to the talk as "snake oil crypto." - https://uk.pcmag.com/news/122058/black-hat-attendees-sponsored-session-was-snake-oil-crypto
  6. "wrote a paper refuting the claims Grant and Ghannam had made in theirs." - https://unprovable.github.io/drafts/Prime_Generation_For_Breaking_Crypto-5e.pdf
  7. "Original Submission" - https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=35847

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