This is a newly unclassified NSA history of its reaction to academic cryptography in the 1970s: “NSA Comes Out of the Closet: The Debate over Public Cryptography in the Inman Era,” Cryptographic Quarterly, Spring 1996, author still classified. Powered by WPeMatico
Author: infossl
A town in Japan built a giant squid statue with its COVID relief grant. One local told the Chunichi Shimbun newspaper that while the statue may be effective in the long run, the money could have been used for “urgent support,” such as for medical staff and long-term care facilities. But a spokesperson for the … Read More “Friday Squid Blogging: COVID Relief Funds” »
A new draft of an Australian educational curriculum proposes teaching children as young as five cybersecurity: The proposed curriculum aims to teach five-year-old children — an age at which Australian kids first attend school — not to share information such as date of birth or full names with strangers, and that they should consult parents … Read More “Teaching Cybersecurity to Children” »
Nice video of a talk by Chris Shore on the history of Colossus. Powered by WPeMatico
There’s new research that demonstrates security vulnerabilities in all of the AMD and Intel chips with micro-op caches, including the ones that were specifically engineered to be resistant to the Spectre/Meltdown attacks of three years ago. Details: The new line of attacks exploits the micro-op cache: an on-chip structure that speeds up computing by storing … Read More “New Spectre-Like Attacks” »
This is an impressive hack: Security researchers Ralf-Philipp Weinmann of Kunnamon, Inc. and Benedikt Schmotzle of Comsecuris GmbH have found remote zero-click security vulnerabilities in an open-source software component (ConnMan) used in Tesla automobiles that allowed them to compromise parked cars and control their infotainment systems over WiFi. It would be possible for an attacker … Read More “Tesla Remotely Hacked from a Drone” »
The person behind the Bitcoin Fog was identified and arrested. Bitcoin Fog was an anonymization service: for a fee, it mixed a bunch of people’s bitcoins up so that it was hard to figure out where any individual coins came from. It ran for ten years. Identifying the person behind Bitcoin Fog serves as an … Read More “Identifying the Person Behind Bitcoin Fog” »
Nice excerpt from Martin Wallin’s book Squid. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here. Powered by WPeMatico
Apple just patched a MacOS vulnerability that bypassed malware checks. The flaw is akin to a front entrance that’s barred and bolted effectively, but with a cat door at the bottom that you can easily toss a bomb through. Apple mistakenly assumed that applications will always have certain specific attributes. Owens discovered that if he … Read More “Serious MacOS Vulnerability Patched” »
In this entertaining story of French serial criminal Rédoine Faïd and his jailbreaking ways, there’s this bit about cell phone surveillance: After Faïd’s helicopter breakout, 3,000 police officers took part in the manhunt. According to the 2019 documentary La Traque de Rédoine Faïd, detective units scoured records of cell phones used during his escape, isolating … Read More “Identifying People Through Lack of Cell Phone Use” »