Useful best practices for malware writers, courtesy of the CIA. Seems like a lot of good advice. General: DO obfuscate or encrypt all strings and configuration data that directly relate to tool functionality. Consideration should be made to also only de-obfuscating strings in-memory at the moment the data is needed. When a previously de-obfuscated value … Read More “The CIA's “Development Tradecraft DOs and DON'Ts”” »
Category: cryptography
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If I had to guess right now, I’d say the documents came from an outsider and not an insider. My reasoning: One, there is absolutely nothing illegal in the contents of any of this stuff. It’s exactly what you’d expect the CIA to be doing in cyberspace. That makes the whistleblower motive less likely. And … Read More “More on the CIA Document Leak” »
The first collision in the SHA-1 hash function has been found. This is not a surprise. We’ve all expected this for over a decade, watching computing power increase. This is why NIST standardized SHA-3 in 2012. Powered by WPeMatico
New paper: “A Simple Power Analysis Attack on the Twofish Key Schedule.” This shouldn’t be a surprise; these attacks are devastating if you don’t take steps to mitigate them. The general issue is if an attacker has physical control of the computer performing the encryption, it is very hard to secure the encryption inside the … Read More “Twofish Power Analysis Attack” »
NIST is accepting proposals for public-key algorithms immune to quantum computing techniques. Details here. Deadline is the end of November 2017. I applaud NIST for taking the lead on this, and for taking it now when there is no emergency and we have time to do this right. Slashdot thread. Powered by WPeMatico
That’s the conclusion of a research paper: Once [costs and complexity] are eliminated, it enables big hosting providers to issue and deploy certificates for their customers in bulk, thus quickly and automatically enable encryption across a large number of domains. For example, we have shown that currently, 47% of LE certified domains are hosted at … Read More “Let's Encrypt Is Making Web Encryption Easier” »
Yale University Press has published a facsimile of the Voynich Manuscript. The manuscript is also available online. Powered by WPeMatico
The NSA has been abandoning secret and proprietary cryptographic algorithms in favor of commercial public algorithms, generally known as “Suite B.” In 2010, an NSA employee filed some sort of whistleblower complaint, alleging that this move is both insecure and wasteful. The US DoD Inspector General investigated and wrote a report in 2011. The report … Read More “Whistleblower Investigative Report on NSA Suite B Cryptography” »
This is exactly the sort of Internet-of-Things attack that has me worried: “IoT Goes Nuclear: Creating a ZigBee Chain Reaction” by Eyal Ronen, Colin OFlynn, Adi Shamir and Achi-Or Weingarten. Abstract: Within the next few years, billions of IoT devices will densely populate our cities. In this paper we describe a new type of threat … Read More “Self-Propagating Smart Light Bulb Worm” »
Interesting: Roughly three weeks later, there is a operation program available to crack ACBL hand records. Given three consecutive boards, all the remaining boards for that session can be determined. The program can be easily parallelized. This analysis can be finished while sessions are still running this would permit the following type of attack: A … Read More “Hacking Bridge-Hand Generation Software” »