This is pretty amazing: International customers and users of disposable or prepaid phones are the people most affected by the software. But the scope is unclear. The Chinese company that wrote the software, Shanghai Adups Technology Company, says its code runs on more than 700 million phones, cars and other smart devices. One American phone … Read More “Smartphone Secretly Sends Private Data to China” »
Category: backdoors
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Remember the San Bernardino killer’s iPhone, and how the FBI maintained that they couldn’t get the encryption key without Apple providing them with a universal backdoor? Many of us computer-security experts said that they were wrong, and there were several possible techniques they could use. One of them was manually removing the flash chip from … Read More “Recovering an iPhone 5c Passcode” »
Ever since Ian Krstić, Apple’s Head of Security Engineering and Architecture, presented the company’s key backup technology at Black Hat 2016, people have been pointing to it as evidence that the company can create a secure backdoor for law enforcement. It’s not. Matthew Green and Steve Bellovin have both explained why not. And the same … Read More “Apple's Cloud Key Vault” »
In a cautionary tale to those who favor government-mandated backdoors to security systems, Microsoft accidentally leaked the key protecting its UEFI Secure boot feature. As we all know, the problems with backdoors are less the cryptography and more the systems surrounding the cryptography. Powered by WPeMatico
New paper: “Surreptitiously Weakening Cryptographic Systems,” by Bruce Schneier, Matthew Fredrikson, Tadayoshi Kohno, and Thomas Ristenpart. Abstract: Revelations over the past couple of years highlight the importance of understanding malicious and surreptitious weakening of cryptographic systems. We provide an overview of this domain, using a number of historical examples to drive development of a weaknesses … Read More “"Surreptitiously Weakening Cryptographic Systems"” »