The following is an interview to Elia Florio, a Symantec Security Response Engineer, about the interactions between two apparently disjoint areas: cryptography and virology.

 

In particular, this work originates from the idea that, in a practical context, it is appreciable to have feedbacks from the wild, instead of being limited to a theoretical model. And it's just because of the chaos present in the security outlook that I thought it was useful to show the confluence points of these two subjects, giving particular attention to their implementations.

 

I would like to thank Elia Florio for his precious collaboration, and Andrea Lelli for his help.

 

 

Keywords: cryptography, cryptovirology, polymorphic virus, crypto-counters, ransomwares