Cryptoparty

Cryptoparty is a worldwide movement organizing events to educate users how to use cryptography. We’ve had two in quick succession at SSH with great turnout and they’ve been a lot of fun! The motivation is to empower regular people to protect their private data in an era of widespread surveillance. There are many tools available to do this – some more user friendly than others – and these events provide a forum for technical folks to come together and help those who are interested in learning how to keep themselves and their data safe.

The March Cryptoparty focused on setting up PGP for email encryption, and the April one focused on using Tor for anonymous web browsing as well as using Off-the-Record (OTR) messaging for encrypted instant messaging using XMPP/Jabber. In April, we split things up into two sessions: a session for absolute beginners where even the word encryption is explained, and a session for those who have more exposure to cryptography. For the inaugural advanced session, Eric gave a nice talk on the mathematical assumptions behind public key cryptography. Mason also showed us what data an attacker could gather by exploiting the recent OpenSSL Heartbleed bug on a VM set up in the space.

You can follow @Cryptopartychi on twitter to get notifications of upcoming cryptoparties, as well as check out the Cryptoparty wiki page at http://wiki.sshchicago.org/wiki/Cryptoparty. We plan on having another Cryptoparty at SSH in July.

If you’d like to be involved in organizing Cryptoparty, that’s great! If you know how to use the most commonly taught tools – PGP/OTR/Tor – and would like to help teach during the workshop time at Cryptoparty, just come to the events and your assistance would be much appreciated. If you have more knowledge about a particular area (e.g. cryptocurrencies, etc.) and would like to give a 20-30 minute talk telling us about it, please email jen@redshiftzero.com.