Six months after leaving his job at Sun Microsystems noted cryptographer Whitfield 'Whit' Diffie has landed a new gig, this time as a security adviser to the corporation that manages the Internet.

Centrelink will release its $560,000 smart card identification protocol for free in an attempt to buy-back security systems based on the technology.

VeriSign said it plans to buy Certicom, just three days after Research In Motion's hostile bid for the security company unraveled.

Fifteen-year-old Peter Schmidt-Nielsen spent only a month working on his submission, but he thinks he's come up with something "unusual and new." Never mind that he's up against some of the most famous cryptographers in the world.

Unless you're a dyed in the wool cryptographic geek you probably didn't know that there was a Crypto conference, or even a chain of worldwide crypto conferences that take place each year. Fortunately, for the most of us that aren't crypto geeks there are a handful of very highly skilled people who are; they can take the highly theoretical and complex mathematical proofs and arguments that make up most of modern cryptographic and cryptanalytic research and put it into plain language.