Thanks for the introduction. Good morning everyone. Yeah, so this is joint work with my My two colleagues at MSR Patrick Longer and Michael Narrag who are both up the front here Okay, so We've heard some different opinions on when or if quantum computers are going to come and destroy all of the public key crypto that we're currently using and A lot of people some people think that it's never going to happen Some people think that they already exist and a lot of us have are in some camp somewhere in the middle But the agencies and companies around the world are doing the due diligence and have announced that the standards are going to be updated In the next decade or so anyway so in August last year you might have seen the the announcement from the NSA that the the sweet bee Cryptography will be the sweet bees is going to be updated to include post quantum algorithms and In this just this month following a sequence of announcements NIST have said and even said last night that They're going to be pushing for an agenda over the next five years With a deadline late next year to look at post quantum candidates. Now. This is just the Examples in the states, but in Europe and Asia and all over the world. There's many many many companies groups and organizations that are Investing a lot of time effort and money into examining post quantum candidates to see what we're going to do to replace All of these all of these things that will fall if a quantum computer or when a quantum computer comes So in our group, we've been seriously looking at this problem as well And and in general when you go and look at any of these documents that talk about post quantum cryptography You see sort of four common themes or four common arenas that people are considering Or seriously considering to look for post-common quantum primitives lattice-based lattice-based stuff like Andrew and lwe and its ring variants Code-based cryptography hash-based and multivariate based and often after these sort of four strong pillars of of post quantum primitives you see a paragraph or a Subsection mentioning all of the other ones and sometimes you see isogeny base mentioned along alongside Some other ones, but we sort of from all the study we've done so far We think that the that isogeny base is worth being considered as one of the five The five pillars that we should be looking at for post quantum public key public key crypto So in this way in this talk, we're going to be looking at That this this fifth one isogeny base crypto by it was the super-single isogeny Dippy Holman that was introduced by Jao and DeFeo in 2011 I think one of the reasons that it might not yet be considered as as stronger of an option as the other four is because of simply because it hasn't withstood the test of time It's it's much newer than these other four But on the other hand it really offers a lot more Or in some situations it shows a lot of potential Compared to these to these other four primitives in particular Yes, it's it's a lot younger and it's so that the confidence is a bit smaller But so the key sizes The best attacks against SIDH are exponential in the in the size of the the prime field And therefore we've we've got a primitive to do Diffie Holman where the the the public keys are a lot smaller than a lot of these other variants and so Yes, okay, so the first thing I want to warn you about is not to be deterred by the word super singular because for those that have been in the game of curve-based crypto for a long time will know that Super singular curves have had a rough ride in in cryptography starting with the original ecc papers that recommended super singular curves as an option Because they were easy to count the number of or to write down the number of points on them And then in the 90s we saw the attacks by by Frey Rock and the MOV attack that showed that we could use a pairing to Attack the the finite field version and then they were brought back when pairings were used for constructive purposes And then we decided that there were ordinary pairing friendly curves that were better than super singular curves And in recent times those super singular curves that that seemed to survive that the low characteristic ones as you saw in the last talk have been Have been attacked, but all of this is kind of irrelevant with respect to this talk Because all of those highs and lows of super singular curves have related to the discrete log problem And the point is that in this work the discrete log problem is is irrelevant This has nothing to do with the discrete log problem. In fact The curves that that we use in SIDH You'd be hard-pressed to find a curve that has an easier discrete log problem than the than the curves we use So the discrete log problem is easy on these curves. It's got nothing to do with that So if the word super singular makes you feel cautious don't try to ignore that that hunch Okay, some basic facts about Isogenes for anyone that's done the that knows the basics of elliptic curve cryptography You deal with isogenes all the time If you're computing a doubling map The multiplication by two that that's an isogeny. It's just a particular case of an isogeny where the Where the domain and the co-domain that the curves e1 and e2 are the same curve But an isogen is is more general than that Then the multiplication by and that which is an amorphism and isogeny is is a Is a map that takes Points on the curvy one to points on the curve e2 so when you come to double the point you do some computations in its x and y coordinates and magically you land on the On the same curve and I saw do is kind of even less magic than that if you like you still do some Computations in the x and y coordinates, but you land on a different curve It's all it's all very natural Because it's a it's a group homomorphism and so It's it's a very natural one-to-one correspondence or connection between Isogenes and and their kernels so if you write down a kernel or specify a kernel By the definition of it being a group homomorphism if if the isogeny maps a point P to The identity or the point of infinity if you like then it would map any multiple of that point to the point of infinity, so It's we naturally have this correspondence between an isogeny and its kernel And it should be said that up to ice up to isomorphism if you if you specify a subgroup on an elliptic curve There exists an isogeny And an image curve a unique isogeny and image curve such that that subgroup is the is the kernel group and and we write the we either write that the image curve is the Sojournity one or to the a one question with the with the subgroup Now the degree the degree of an isogeny is the number of elements in its kernel Which is the same as its degree as a rational map, so you should think of an isogeny as being as I said a generalized The the the general case of an anamorphism, which is where the the two curves are the same And if you're used to dealing with an isomorphism then an isomorphism is just an isogeny of degree one where the Where the the kernel is trivial and so high degree isogenes have a non-trivial kernel But these are just an isogeny is just a general a Generalization of these these two things that we're probably used to dealing with if we've done even the basic ECC stuff Okay, so here's a here's a a brief history of SIDH and where it where it comes from In 2006 after a series of papers of Russian papers by Stolbenov and his advisor Rust of serve they proposed doing isogeny based Diffie helman but they they chose ordinary curves to to instantiate the the Diffie helman And in 2010 Charles Jau and Sukarev gave a quantum sub-exponential algorithm to attack To attack the ordinary case when the when the The curves used were ordinary so in 2011 Jau and DeFeo fixed this by choosing By instead choosing super singular curves for those that don't know the difference that There's a lot of equivalent definitions of ordinary and super singular But an elliptic curve is either one or the other So the natural thing to do if ordinary curves were were broken or there's a sub-exponential attack was to look at the super singular case And that's what Jau and DeFeo did successfully in 2011 So the the yeah, as I said, there's a lot of equivalent definitions You can see silver or nor or any of the good elliptic curve books to see what the difference between super singular and an ordinary is but for our purposes The the important thing is that the the endomorphism ring Of of super singular curves is non-commutative In in the ordinary case, it's commutative and that's what allowed them to do this quantum sub-exponential attack but this non commutative commutativity of the endomorphism ring is what What makes the attack not work in the in the super singular case? So that's what gives us this This confidence that at least that attack isn't applicable in the super singular case okay, so This is kind of the cheat sheet for For you that if if you don't take anything else away from the talk if nothing else makes sense then Hopefully you just take this slide away on the in the two left columns, we've got the The Diffie-Hulman that we're used to doing find out feel Diffie-Hulman and elliptic curve Diffie-Hulman where our elements are Elements modular prime our exponents are typically integers and We've got these analogs of you know the fundamental operation in in Diffie-Hulman based base crypto exponentiation in the group and Of course the hard problem is that is the the discrete log problem the inverting that operation So in the SIDH case Our elements are curves in an isogenic class. I'll talk more about that in a second And our secrets are the isogenes Okay, and so the the fundamental operation that we're going to do in SIDH is to to get our secret isogenic and to map it and to apply it to a Apply it to a curve E and Output the the isogenic evaluated at that curve Okay, so the problem that we're basing our security on is given the curve and its image curve to go and find what that secret Isogenic was now although this I Said that it's only been around since 2011 We've got some confidence because this problem this general isogenic problem has been studied by by mathematicians and Cryptographers for some time it's appeared in several other contexts as well. So we've got confidence that it is hard to solve now What do these? as far as what sort of a setting we've got what it looks like it's you shouldn't really think of the The elements as being a group. It's not a group as such But but what we've got is a very well connected graph a Well connected regular graph where the nodes are elliptic curves or rather isomorphism classes of elliptic curves so every node in this graph is an elliptic curve and The edges in the graph are the isogenes between them And in the super singular case, we've got a really big graph. It's well connected. It's it's regular And it's got this this nice property that that John DeFeo talk about this Romano's young property where We're told that if you from from any point in the graph so long as you were you walk far enough You you can lend at any other point in the graph And and in the SIDH we certainly walk much further than that to make sure that from any point in this regular graph we can land at any other point okay So here's here's the very simplified version of of SIDH. Here's SIDH in a nutshell sweeping a lot of details on the under the rug in this slide, but There's this public base curve E naught that everybody has and what Alice is going to do is she's going to Choose her secret isogeny and the way she does that is just by choosing a secret subgroup on E naught remember subgroups and isogenes are in or in correspondence with one another so Alice chooses this secret subgroup and computes the isogeny at E naught computes 5a and Publishes her public key as E of a A technicality is that Alice is going to compute two to isogenes and Bob's going to compute three isogenes as long as these two Things are co-prime. It just it's just a nice way to make sure that they don't interact with each other and and Everything is well behaved, but Bob's going to do the same thing He's going to evaluate his isogeny at the base curve and publish his public key eb Then they're going to compute some different isogeny to land at the shared secret e of a b now the obstruction that Joe and Defeo had to overcome this kind of non-trivial obstruction is that because the anamorphism ring isn't commutative and They that fire babe could not just be applied to to this image curve as is And so a technicality that I won't get into too much details about is how they overcame this but essentially what they have to do is and I ask you not to worry about keeping the details here, but these are just for for future reference what they have to do is is evaluate also evaluate their isogenes at some generator points and this means that they can That they can eventually arrive at the same kernel. So without without this extra information It's hard to know what what these 5b dash and 5a dash should be but so long as Alice and Bob not only compute their the isogen is curved but also Evaluate the isogeny at some public generators at each other's public generators, then that's enough for them to arrive at this this shared secret So that's the obstruction that was overcame in this 2011 paper and I should say that because these the nodes in the graph are isomorphism classes the shared secret is the Jane variant which is Which is the same regardless of which curve they arrive at as long as it's in the same isomorphism class Okay, so that's how that's how SIDH works in a nutshell. There's some some details that are swept under the rug like the fact that in That these Secrets are chosen as subgroups of the torsion and the torsion's two-dimensional two-dimensional which is why there's Which is why there's two points here chosen We the way we actually choose this secret subgroup is to choose a secret scalar and to compute this This this two-dimensional PA plus SA SA times qA which chooses a unique subgroup in the two-dimensional torsion We couldn't just fix one generator here because it would always be the same subgroup that we're in Okay So what about the security again sweeping many details under the rug, but The security the setting is these elliptic curves Over fp squared where P is a large prime all super singular elliptic curves are defined over fp squared and our hard problem here is Not only given the curve and its image But given those two points on the curve and their image under the iso genie So it looks like the iso genie problem with a little bit of extra information that that is Believe not to add any advantage at least in the abstract sense of the problem so the hard problem is Yeah, given that given the curve and its image try to find this secret iso genie. What with the secret subgroup that was used Equivalently to compute that iso genie the only difference between this and the general the general iso genie problem is that because of the nature of the system the Iso genie that we're dealing with here has a fixed public and smooth degree But yeah, we believe that this doesn't The problem is still very very hard under this under this situation now the best known attacks The best known classical attacks are bigger of p to the one fourth in the in the prime characteristic of the field and That's the best classical attack and the best quantum attack is is bigger of p to the one on six now the nice sort of confidence confidence building Fact about this is that these are sort of given this this problem of trying to connect Trying to connect two nodes in a graph where the degree of the connection is known This is a classical sort of problem in computer science called the claw problem and as as Joe and DeFeo say These complexities are optimal for for such a problem. So the best known attacks are currently Generic which kind of reminds us of of ECC in a way But the best known attack is Polaro, which is generic. It doesn't use any of the underlying structure Which is which is confidence building for now the the It should be said and I should have said earlier that one of the things that we really like about the SIDH being having such small keys is The keys are so small But even if these attacks even if different attacks come around where these exponents are even better The problem is still very interesting so long as it's not a catastrophic, you know sub exponential or polynomial time attack Then SIDH is very interesting compared to the other the other four The other four post quantum primitives Okay, so let's start to talk about how we how we do these computations We need to compute we need to compute Isogenes of some degree now should be said that computing an isogenic of degree of prime to get prime degree L has complexity at least big O of L So it's it if exponentially large primes. It's these algorithms are exponential But we need an exponential number of Isogenes and kernel subgroups for this for this problem to be hard. So the upshot is that The isogenes must have exponential degree but to be able to compute them We need to do these things in logarithmic time. And so we can't do that unless they're unless they're smooth So we're gonna only be using isogenes of degree L to the e for L being two or three And so this is how this is briefly how it works Suppose we've got a point R naught of order two to the two to the three seventy-two This is actually from our implementation the parameters that we used then Of course, we can't specify all two to the three seventy-two points in the kernel of that In the subgroup of our not to compute that isogenic in one go. We have to factor this thing into two isogenes so what we're going to do is start with our R naught and Multiply it by two to the three seventy-one to almost kill it And then this point has order two which means that we can we can proceed from a naught to a one using a two isogenic and Then we evaluate that two isogenic at our naught To get our one and then we almost kill our one on the new curve And we keep doing this all the way down until we've computed three hundred and seventy-one two isogenes The product of which is the is the large the large secret isogenic I Should say that there's a much faster way than this sort of this is like the naive way in in the in the Joe and DeFeo and and flute follow-up paper or the extended version they show a much faster way But for the purposes of this talk, it's just to show that there's two types of arithmetic that's going on in SIDH Namely, there's a lot of arithmetic happening on a fixed curve So when we when we're varying points on a fixed curve and then we have to compute an isogenic to get to a new curve and do Arithmetic on that new curve. So it's not only the traditional ECC arithmetic that we're used to but also this isogenic arithmetic Okay, so the motivation for our for our work was We looked at the the original implementation the proof of concept implementation that which was which was really encouraging in terms of performance But we wanted to know whether we could securely deploy SIDH in practice And I suppose one of the one of the fundamental things we wanted to do was to see if we could mimic the the level of constant time side channel resistant Software that we but we've come to be able to implement in there in the traditional number theoretic settings So we wanted to sort of strive for that same level of constant time behavior and see whether this brought up any new issues as far as As far as SIDH goes So as far as performance goes we sort of had three improvements over the over the original implementation, but I'll only briefly talk about one of them today Namely not number one if you want to learn about the other two then come up and talk to one of us or read the paper So I'll talk about this projective isogenes and the fact that we're now working in P1 everywhere in one slide So in ECDH as I said, we usually move around with different points on one fixed curve in SIDH we do that as well as move around with We move around with different points on a fixed curve and then we change curves and move around on a new curve so the This contribution was sort of mimicking what was already done in the ECDH case By Montgomery and others which was to show that instead of working with both the X and Y coordinates on a curve Or rather when you cast that into a projective space to avoid inversions you work with XYZ in P2 Instead of working with all three of those you can drop one of the coordinates you can drop the Y coordinate and just work in in P1 So this is what Montgomery showed you could do very efficiently when the curve is fixed In our case we wanted to do that and to do the same thing when we when we proceed from curve to curve around the isogenic graph, so it was particularly nice especially in the case of Montgomery curves where Instead of updating these A and B coefficients from curve to curve we decided to work with them projectively to avoid inversions and We realized that instead of working with all three projective coordinates On a curve like this we can again ignore the B coefficient When when working in the Montgomery form and the reason is that the B coefficient All it does is tell you whether you're on the curve or its quadratic twist and in the context of SIDH Both of these things have the same J invariant So it's it's kind of nice that we can ignore whether we're on the curve or its quadratic twist We end up with the same shared secret even if we ignore these these B computations So mimicking that the arithmetic of Montgomery on the on the curves. We're able to do similar arithmetic In the isogenic in the isogenic graph Okay, just quickly this is these are the parameters we chose we were striving for up 128 bits of Security against the best-known quantum attack. So our prime is roughly 768 bits in size This is our starting curve. That's public for everybody to know Here's the number of points on the curve. It's got an easy easy DLP We our public parameters. These are the generators that Alice and Bob have to know Of each other to evaluate their isogenies out Their secret subgroup or secret isogeny is chosen by 48 bite private keys Their public keys are three Three x coordinates which represent the the the x coordinates of the of the evaluated isogeny and Also determined the evaluated curve the details are in the paper and at the end of the day They come to compute this this common J invariant one element of fp squared, which is a hundred and eighty-eight bytes Okay, let me quickly talk about performance So in this in this is our our performance compared to the the prior implementation I it's somewhere between two two point five and three times faster than that work, but I should say that there's a Lot of different things going on and namely that the most important one is that this work is is in constant time So the prior stuff did a lot of inversions, but was was calling non-constant time inversion routines for that In our case we avoided a lot of inversions Because we wanted them we wanted to compute them using Fermat's theorem in constant time So a decent a decent saving over the the prior work and just very quickly I thought that One other thing that we thought was really good to look at was to see how this how this would perform with it with a hybrid a hybrid scheme that was Incorporated classical ECC with Post quantum SIDH. So the the motivation here is especially because SIDH is so young We might want to pair this with With the electric curve discreet log problem to at least give us some sort of strong classical guarantee that these things not going to fall To anything but a quantum computer and in the hybrid case is very Very attractive especially in the in the terms of SIDH because you can do a lot of code sharing you've got all this Arithmetic lying around to do the Montgomery ladder On your on your super singular curves anyway, but of course for the ECDLP we don't want We don't want such a curve. We want it to be to have a hard ECDLP So it's as easy as just changing one constant and using all the same software and for very little For very little overhead. Yeah, you get a lot more classical security based on a much more long-standing problem Which is which is quite attractive All right, I thought I'd finish on a slide that compares SIDH to Some of the popular lattice primitives around so this is the performance of These are the performance numbers taken from the paper Frodo Which which looked at implementing a plain LWE like Divi helman analog and So you can see the trade-off here in the in the last column You've got the size of the public keys and it shows that SIDH is significantly smaller than these other lattice these other ladder schemes But you show that we have a quite a significant performance gap here But what I should say is that these numbers are these numbers are for the plain C implementation of this work and This is really favorable to the lattice primitives for example our assembly implementation Is is you know 14 or 15 times faster than our plain C implementation in the speed up on the other cases Isn't isn't anywhere near as extreme so When you come to look at this look at a hardcore implementation of these schemes It's sort of much closer than this gap Suggests, but nevertheless this is this is what it looks like It's a trade-off for small keys for a little a little slower performance For for ephemeral Divi helman. I should give some Just finished by advertising that there's a paper coming into Asia Crypt I've got to stop paper coming to Asia Crypt that's talking about public key validation and They just got accepted to Asia Crypt by Gal Braith petite shoney and tea And so our library only supports ephemeral SIDH. There's some issues with public key validation there Thanks very much


Hello everybody, HoodedCoverCommander788 here, and this is my first video since I returned from Joe Kahn in Springfield, Illinois. It was great to see some of you there, and for my first video back, I wanted to do something big. Not that big, but still big. We're going to look at the 1984 GI Joe hovercraft, The Killer Whale, and its driver, Cutter. Check out that monster, is that big enough for you? This is the Killer Whale, sometimes just called the Whale, it is a hovercraft, and the word Whale is an acronym that stands for Warrior Hovering Assault Launching Envoy, which makes no sense, but they just had to throw some random words together to make an acronym that spelled Whale. Heaven forbid we have a vehicle name that isn't an acronym, we can't have that. The Killer Whale was introduced in 1984, which is surprisingly early in the 80s GI Joe run for such a large vehicle. It was also sold in 1985, it was discontinued in 1986. In 1992 to 1993, it was briefly available as a mail away from Hasbro Direct. In 1986 when the Killer Whale was discontinued, there was not a comparable watercraft replacement. There was the Devilfish, but that was quite a bit smaller. As far as a landcraft, since the Killer Whale was a hovercraft and it could go on land too, there was the Havoc that came out that year, but it was slightly smaller, I'm not sure you would consider that to be a replacement for this. In 1988 the Killer Whale was remoulded in different colored plastic and redubbed the Night Striker as part of the Toys R Us exclusive Night Force line. It was worth six flag points, which is a lot of flag points, but it was a very large vehicle and it came with an action figure, Cutter, I'm going to take a closer look at Cutter and his file card a little later so I'm going to set them aside for now. As far as a real world analog for the Killer Whale, I think it most resembles the PACV, the Patrol Air Cushion Vehicle used by the US Navy in the Vietnam era. The Whale would be bigger than the PACV, it's kind of a beefed up version of that vehicle, but I do think it is very reminiscent of that design. Let's look at the parts and features of the Killer Whale, starting as we usually do with the front. Here in the front we have the Recon Sled Landing Ramp and there are some variants of this ramp, some of them have a small notch in them like this one, some of them have a larger notch and some of them have no notch at all. Now I only have one version of this, I do like to show variants to you when I can, but that kind of variant where it's really just a difference in the notch like that, that's not very interesting to me so I don't usually seek them out. You open the ramp just by pulling down at the notch and this ramp is frequently broken, especially at these little knobs where it connects to the vehicle itself. Those are often broken off, in fact they are broken on mine, I've done a little home repair job replacing the plastic knobs with metal ones. The ramp houses the Recon Sled which fits inside there and it is spring loaded, it's operated by a button here on the top, you just press the button and it shoots the Recon Sled out. The Recon Sled is made up of four parts, there's the main body, there's the canopy and this canopy does not stay on well, in fact it pops off every time I launch the Recon Sled and underneath there are wheels, there's a front set of wheels and a back wheel. You can put a figure in the Recon Sled, you just slide them in there, he's supposed to go in face down and you put the canopy over him, he doesn't peg in, there's no seat belt or anything like that so he's just loose like that. You can put the Recon Sled back in the bay where it goes and just kind of feel the spring in there and you push it back until it clicks and then of course you can launch it with the figure on board. You can see it doesn't really go quite as far with the figure on there, it's a bit heavier. Some of these old springs are not as strong as they used to be but the canopy did stay on a little bit better that time. This is a look at the inside of the Recon Sled bay and those two white tabs right there, those are connected to the spring and that's what you push back to load the spring so you can launch the Sled. Here's the Recon Sled float, yeah that float's not too bad on its own, what about with a figure on it, yeah actually it still floats fairly well. The next part is this loading ramp which you just flip forward and this is two parts, there's the outer part that's kind of part of the hull and this inner ramp part here and those are separate and they can come loose, this can come off so if you're looking for a killer whale, you want to buy one, make sure you take a look and make sure this is there because if you're just looking at it from the outside you can't really tell, you don't want to be missing that part. Next we have the canopy and you have to move the guns aside in order to flip the canopy up and this canopy has a clear plastic piece here that works like a windshield and that is another frequently missing part, it took me a while to get that part so I could really complete this whale so watch out for that as well, you'll see a lot of them with that missing but there is supposed to be something there, that's not just an open window. With the ramp down and the canopy up we can take a closer look at the troop carrying compartment which looks really nice, it's very roomy, lots of space in there, there's some nice details sculpted in all around that looks really good and we have some foot pegs and it looks like this is intended to accommodate four figures with one foot peg per foot so for both feet of the figure, usually if you have foot pegs it's just one foot peg for each figure but it looks like they wanted to give you a way to secure the figure in a little bit better in this. It's nice that they put foot pegs in there, you can stand the figure up and blow torches in here kind of demonstrating how you can do that but some of the foot pegs are actually kind of deep in there and it's not so easy to get a figure pegged in, to be honest though when we were kids the way we would put troops in here was more like this, ready to go. Here of course we have the button that operates the spring load is sled and on either side here we have 105 millimeter pounder cannons and these are really huge, they're like tank cannons, they're big cannons and they actually have a cap here on the end, that's a separate piece that's not molded in and often you will find these end pieces on the cannons missing, they do elevate a little bit, they do not traverse, however they're held in by these pieces here and the tabs on these pieces can tend to either break or wear down so they don't hold them in very well and they'll just pop out like that. On the sides we have some additional clear plastic window panes here and we have this pretty sweet logo of an orca also known as a killer whale but you shouldn't call it a killer whale because that's racist. Up at the top here we have these really sweet twin crows nest gun turrets with 1.75 inch thrasher anti-aircraft guns, these are listed on the blueprints as anti-aircraft guns but in the comic books they were used both as anti-aircraft guns and anti-personnel guns which is fine I guess, they're pretty powerful guns and they'll poke holes in pretty much anything you shoot at. There is no seat inside the turret for the action figure, they just slide in and their feet stick directly down into the troop carrying compartment on the inside and the turrets they do traverse not all the way around but part of the way, they traverse pretty far and they do elevate also, they don't elevate very far and the guns are held onto the turret with some clips and those clips can break so watch out for that. I usually display the killer whale with blowtorch and bazooka manning the turrets, they are brightly colored, they're kind of making themselves big targets so I figured at least they'll be partially protected in the gun turrets and they can make themselves useful by firing at enemy aircraft and such. On both sides you have removable engine covers, you pull those off and you have some engine detail, so far the killer whale has been more or less symmetrical with the same features on both sides but we do get to some asymmetrical features as we move toward the back. On both sides we have these missile boxes which the blueprints call quad tube surface to air missile launchers, they do elevate and they can pivot at that point right there so they do turn a bit as well, they don't turn all the way around but they can turn a bit. The boxes are connected to this bar by a set of teeth and those teeth are easily broken that's another frequently broken part and if one of those teeth breaks off the box doesn't really fit on right anymore so that's something you definitely have to watch out for and if you're taking these boxes off of the bar frequently you're going to have to really watch out for that and make sure you don't break those teeth, in fact if you get them on I would recommend just leaving them on. Each missile box has four missiles and the missiles are identical so we can just take a look at one of them, they're fairly plain missiles in kind of a light gray or slightly off white color and this is a fairly soft plastic, this is not the same hard plastic that the vehicles made out of so they do give and bend just a little bit. Over time these missile boxes can become very loose and they won't stay up like they used to, they'll kind of flop down like that, there's probably a way to fix that I haven't really gotten around to it yet but you know that's something to watch out for. In the missile pod we have the driver compartment which the blueprints call the flying bridge command post, it's kind of a conning tower, it's elevated above the gun turrets, it has a glass windscreen around it and you can see it has some pretty good sculpted detail in there, it has a control panel and that's a separate piece there, that's another thing you need to watch out for because that can be missing and if you're looking on eBay you may not be able to see down inside there to know that it's there, watch out for missing control panels. Again there are foot pegs in there to accommodate two action figures, one peg per foot and you can put cutter in there and once he's pegged in he actually stands in there pretty well, pretty solidly. Here's what the driver compartment looks like from the front and the sides, you can see cutter in there piloting the ship, there is no pilot seat, the captain of the ship stands while operating the vehicle, one thing that strikes me as kind of odd is it doesn't have any easy path of ingress or egress for this driver compartment, the driver is going to have to climb over something in order to get in there, there's no ladder or stairs or steps or hatch or anything like that, which is a little bit odd, often Hasbro thought of that kind of thing when designing these vehicles. Behind the bridge we have the mechanism that operates the spinning fan blades, you push that down and both fan blades will spin at the same time. Looking at it from the back you can see how the double fan spinning action feature works, you just push down on this lever and it spins both fans, that's pretty cool. Now we'll get to some of the asymmetrical features, on the starboard side we have depth charges with a depth charge launcher, this launcher has a handle on there, essentially you just lift it up and it should let one of the depth charges drop out, it's a little bit tight on mine so it doesn't always work too well, but that's how it's supposed to work, you're supposed to swing it forward it drops another one into place, it's hard to get mine to work the way it's supposed to, it should just drop that right out of there and that just never seems to work on mine. These depth charges are pretty simple and basic, they have danger stickers on either end and they're basically just barrels, these of course would be anti-submarine weapons, there's enough space on the back here for five depth charges but oddly enough the killer whale came with six depth charges and that's pretty odd, I don't know why they gave you an extra one, they certainly didn't give you any extra missiles for the Skystriker or anything like that, reload the depth charges by just rolling them down this ramp, there's nothing that holds them in so if you jostle this vehicle around too much those will fall out. Do the depth charges float? Yes they do. In the back we have this cowling that goes around the fans and attached to those we have the steering vane assembly, of all the easily broken parts on this vehicle, these vertical steering vanes are probably the most frustrating, it's very difficult to find unbroken steering vanes and like this side is unbroken, it looks good, this side however is broken and I've just kind of done a temporary repair job for the moment, at some point I'll do something more permanent or I'll replace those but we do have broken steering vanes on this side and that is very common. Allegedly you can move these vertical steering vanes but here's the thing, don't, they're way too fragile, just leave them alone. The horizontal steering vanes however do move pretty easily and there's no real danger of breaking those. On the port side we have the surveillance cycle which is like a little mini motorcycle and I honestly think it's a little bit funny looking, it's small, this is something that is often forgotten, it doesn't clip in, it doesn't attach or anything, there's just a couple indents here to hold it in and this is another thing that will easily just fall out if you jostle the vehicle around too much and so since this is a completely separate sub vehicle, this is one that a lot of collectors may even forget about. The surveillance cycle is made up of four parts, we have the main body, we have the handle bars that are connected to the front fork, we have the front wheel and we have the back wheel. Here's what the surveillance cycle looks like with a figure on board and that honestly looks kind of goofy, it's too small, it looks like a moped. All the way around the vehicle we have this hover skirt molded in black and this of course is what makes it a hover craft so it can go on land as well as in the water. The hover skirt is a bit wider than the main body of the vehicle which increases the footprint of the killer whale quite a bit, it is a very large vehicle. Since the killer whale is a toy hover craft it needs a way to move on land so on the bottom it has wheels, it has four wheels and each one is on a caster, each one can independently spin around as well as roll and that is kind of cool, it gives the whale the ability to have this kind of gliding motion where it can kind of move in all directions. Also on the underside is this storage compartment, this lid comes off and you can store things in there. What you are intended to store in there I can't really say, I guess you could put accessories or even figures in there if you wanted to. Now these parts the storage compartment cover and the wheels are on the underside of the vehicle so you might not be looking for those when you're thinking of buying a killer whale so just make sure that you check the underside and see that all of these are there. It's not such a big deal if it's missing the compartment cover but if it's missing one of the wheels it's not going to roll properly. Does the killer whale float? Yes it floats very very well, it floats well despite the fact that the recon sled compartment is pretty open and would let water in there but that doesn't seem to really do anything to the floating ability at all, it floats extremely well. Now let's look at Cutter the action figure that came with the killer whale and Cutter is appropriately named after a type of ship. A Cutter is a small ship usually a single masted ship that is designed for speed and that in no way describes the boat that he actually drives. Cutter did not come with any accessories so let's go ahead and look at his articulation. Cutter had the typical articulation for 1984 GI Joe action figures that means he could turn his head from left to right like that. He could move his arm up at the shoulder about so far and he could swivel it all the way around. He had a hinge at the elbow so he could move at the elbow about 90 degrees. He had a swivel at the bicep so he could swivel his arm all the way around. The figure was held together with a rubber o-ring that looped around the inside so he could move at the torso a little bit. He could move his legs apart about so far. He could move his leg at the hip about 90 degrees and he could bend at the knee about 90 degrees. Let's look at the sculpted design and color of Cutter starting with his head and you can see on his head he has a very prominent Boston red socks cap and he has looks like kind of brownish red hair and the Hasbro designer Ron Rudat who designed Cutter said he modeled this face after a Boston red socks player Dwight Evans. On his chest Cutter has a very prominent orange life vest it's very bright you can't miss it and under that he has a light blue shirt with an open collar and this light blue plastic does tend to turn somewhat yellow with age which actually gives it a somewhat green tent. Now the plastic on this one the blue plastic on the chest is still pretty blue that looks pretty good not much yellowing but on the back of this action figure you can see there has been some yellowing some yellowing has occurred there and it has a slightly green tent so that is something you will have to watch out for if you're looking to get a Cutter action figure. His arms feature rolled up sleeves and he has a green watch on his right wrist on his waist piece he has a green belt and it has some pouches on it has some nice detail has some belt loops there that continues around to the back and that looks pretty good and he has some back pockets back there he's wearing blue bell bottom trousers and on his left leg he has a green pistol holster and with the pistol being on his left leg and the watch being on his right wrist this suggests that Cutter is left-handed other than the green holster the legs are pretty plain and he has some fairly plain looking black boots looking at the figure overall it is very colorful with the bright orange life vest and the the blue on the rest of the figure it gives it a nice contrast with the very green and black killer whale so Cutter really stands out when he's driving it also this gives us an opportunity to have a figure that has some color to it it is possible to have a military toy line that includes colors other than green and brown and you can do it in a way that makes sense so it really makes sense that Cutter is wearing a bright orange life vest so if you want color in an action figure this is how you do it in a way that makes sense as opposed to something like ice cream soldier let's take a look at Cutter's file card and this file card would have been an insert inside the box that the killer whale came in it was not printed on the back of the box it was an insert like this and as you can see it was just a card you could cut this out but this one of course is uncut it's still blank on the other side nothing on the other side it has this factionist GI Joe and it has a nice portrait of Cutter here it says he's the hovercraft pilot his codename is Cutter his file name is Skip A Stone that is terrible um Larry Hama the writer of the GI Joe comic book uh was writing these file cards at the time and sometimes he would put a kind of a joke name in and this has to be one of the worst Skip A Stone uh that's a real groaner the only one that might be worse is maybe Albert Pine his primary military specialty is hovercraft captain and it's not referring to captain as his rank uh that is his position as the commander of the ship uh his secondary military specialty is special services and in parentheses it says coach the women's swimming team at Annapolis and that probably has a really interesting story behind it his birthplace is kinsley kansas again nowhere near boston and his grade is lieutenant jg that's lieutenant junior grade i don't know why they listed his rank here instead of his pay grade as they usually do on these file cards if anybody's interested lieutenant junior grade is the equivalent of an o2 the rest of the file card is divided up into three sections and this top section says Cutter badgered his congressman for two years to get into Annapolis this is referring to the us naval academy uh in Annapolis Maryland then realized his family lacked two essential ingredients power and influence opted for the coast guard academy instead so Cutter is a coast guard man not a naval officer this middle section says wanted a life at sea even though hometown was as far away from either ocean as you can get exactly 1561 miles from san francisco and new york city his iron will and contrary nature laced with a truly bizarre sense of humor might explain why this bottom section says found out the joe team didn't have any coast guardsman raised such a stink that the coast guard top brass had to pull every string necessary to fix it it also gave the brass a way to get Cutter out of their hair this file card depicts a person who is very determined tenacious and maybe even stubborn and i kind of admire that Cutter is somebody who simply will not take no for an answer taking a look at the killer whale overall one thing that impresses me is the green color which is not an obvious choice for a watercraft like this it suggests that it's intended to operate on the land just as often as it operates in the water and that means it fits perfectly well with your other gi joe land vehicles and that i think is really impressive this thing is not going to just run alongside the devil fish but this thing will roll alongside the mobat tank and the mauler and the awestriker in a previous video i already compared the killer whale to the cobra watercraft that also came out in 1984 the cobra water moccasin and how this was not really a fair fight however in 1985 we got the cobra moire hydrofoil and this thing is much bigger than the cobra water moccasin and much more of a match for the killer whale even though the cobra moire is still slightly smaller than the killer whale it has a lot more armament than the cobra water moccasin it has a ton of guns and missiles and it has something that the killer whale and the cobra water moccasin lack and that is speed take a look at the killer whale from the front and imagine how terrifying it would be to have this thing coming directly at you with all its guns blazing it has a lot of firepower facing forward however take a look at the killer whale from the back none of its armaments traverse to face aft the killer whale would be vulnerable to attack from behind so the best cobra vehicle to go up against it would be one that is fast and maneuverable like the cobra moire it's hard not to love this vehicle there's nothing subtle about the killer whale it is huge it impresses for size if for nothing else and of course it's loaded with play features it's got lots of guns lots of things that move around it's got a troop carrying compartment missiles it's just loaded the playability of this thing is just so great that you can still do a lot with it even with a lot of the little bits missing i know when we played with this as kids we still had it on pretty much every mission even when there were no missiles left and no depth charges left there's still a lot that you can do with it i seem to remember we played it a little bit fast and loose with the hovering ability when we were kids and at some point it may have been given the ability to fly and may have been used to fight cobra rattlers and helicopters in the air that may not have been technically possible according to science but we were nine years old i love everything about this vehicle and when i say love i really mean love in fact there's something that i've been wanting to do and i hate to put you on the spot like this killer whale uh on camera but i just have to know will you


I'm Neil Diamond Green and I'm the UK Data Service Impact Manager. The UK Data Service Data Impact Fellow programme is now in its third round. What we're interested in is supporting researchers earlier in their career to develop new ways of creating impact from the data held in the UK Data Service Collection. My name is Burjana and I work at the Centre for Longitude and Studies UCL Institute of Education. My name is Ben Brindle and I'm a first-year PhD student at the University of Brighton. My name is Anne-Laurella and I work for Cancer Research UK. The UK Data Service is absolutely paramount to doing my research. Researchers need the data to actually be able to find things out, to actually be able to present evidence. Working in the charity sector is very important because we don't have a lot of access to data. So having this place where we can get freely available data is really valuable for us. I think this fellowship will provide opportunities for me to share my research and the lessons I learned from doing my research with a broader audience. This year we've made eight fellowship awards to early career researchers in both the academic and charity sectors. I'm interested in healthy sustainable diets which involves looking at how to shift the population from current dietary patterns towards healthy sustainable options. At the Institute for Employment Studies we research mainly education, the labour market and health. Working as part of a charity is really important to get the research we do out in the public domain. If it exists to research and inform about inequalities between different generations and nearly all of our research in one way or another uses data which is archived by the UK Data Service. I do use a lot of the data and I guess the way I would develop the impact is to kind of promote research. I've done with all these different data sets that will show people what opportunities there are. So I received the UK DS Data Impact Fellowship last year. It's been fascinating meeting lots of new fellows which has really stimulated new research ideas and also shown me the wide range of research across many different areas. So both people in academia but also today I've had the opportunity to meet lots of people who are doing data driven research and charities but also in the public sector. I'd highly recommend the UK DS Data Impact Fellowship.