This article says that the Virginia Beach police are looking to buy encrypted radios. Virginia Beach police believe encryption will prevent criminals from listening to police communications. They said officer safety would increase and citizens would be better protected. Someone should ask them if they want those radios to have a backdoor. Powered by WPeMatico
Category: backdoors
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Last month, Wired published a long article about Ray Ozzie and his supposed new scheme for adding a backdoor in encrypted devices. It’s a weird article. It paints Ozzie’s proposal as something that “attains the impossible” and “satisfies both law enforcement and privacy purists,” when (1) it’s barely a proposal, and (2) it’s essentially the … Read More “Ray Ozzie’s Encryption Backdoor” »
The ISO has rejected two symmetric encryption algorithms: SIMON and SPECK. These algorithms were both designed by the NSA and made public in 2013. They are optimized for small and low-cost processors like IoT devices. The risk of using NSA-designed ciphers, of course, is that they include NSA-designed backdoors. Personally, I doubt that they’re backdoored. … Read More “Two NSA Algorithms Rejected by the ISO” »
Russia has banned the secure messaging app Telegram. It’s making an absolute mess of the ban — blocking 16 million IP addresses, many belonging to the Amazon and Google clouds — and it’s not even clear that it’s working. But, more importantly, I’m not convinced Telegram is secure in the first place. Such a weird … Read More “Russia is Banning Telegram” »
This is a really interesting research result. This paper proves that two parties can create a secure communications channel using a communications system with a backdoor. It’s a theoretical result, so it doesn’t talk about how easy that channel is to create. And the assumptions on the adversary are pretty reasonable: that each party can … Read More “Subverting Backdoored Encrryption” »
Interesting research into undetectably adding backdoors into computer chips during manufacture: “Stealthy dopant-level hardware Trojans: extended version,” also available here: Abstract: In recent years, hardware Trojans have drawn the attention of governments and industry as well as the scientific community. One of the main concerns is that integrated circuits, e.g., for military or critical-infrastructure applications, … Read More “Adding Backdoors at the Chip Level” »
Seems like everyone is writing about encryption and backdoors this season. “Policy Approaches to the Encryption Debate,” R Street Policy Study #133, by Charles Duan, Arthur Rizer, Zach Graves and Mike Godwin. “Encryption Policy in Democratic Regimes,” East West Institute. I recently blogged about the new National Academies report on the same topic. Here’s a … Read More “Two New Papers on the Encryption Debate” »
Matthew Green wrote a fascinating blog post about the NSA’s efforts to increase the amount of random data exposed in the TLS protocol, and how it interacts with the NSA’s backdoor into the DUAL_EC_PRNG random number generator to weaken TLS. Powered by WPeMatico
The German Interior Minister is preparing a bill that allows the government to mandate backdoors in encryption. No details about how likely this is to pass. I am skeptical. Powered by WPeMatico
Both the New York Times and the Washington Post are reporting that Israel has penetrated Kaspersky’s network and detected the Russian operation. From the New York Times: Israeli intelligence officers informed the NSA that, in the course of their Kaspersky hack, they uncovered evidence that Russian government hackers were using Kaspersky’s access to aggressively scan … Read More “More on Kaspersky and the Stolen NSA Attack Tools” »