Prepare for another attack on encryption in the U.S. The EARN-IT Act purports to be about protecting children from predation, but it’s really about forcing the tech companies to break their encryption schemes: The EARN IT Act would create a “National Commission on Online Child Sexual Exploitation Prevention” tasked with developing “best practices” for owners … Read More “The EARN-IT Act” »
Category: cryptography
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One follow-on to the story of Crypto AG being owned by the CIA: this interview with a Washington Post reporter. The whole thing is worth reading or listening to, but I was struck by these two quotes at the end: …in South America, for instance, many of the governments that were using Crypto machines were … Read More “More on Crypto AG” »
The Swiss cryptography firm Crypto AG sold equipment to governments and militaries around the world for decades after World War II. They were owned by the CIA: But what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence. These … Read More “Crypto AG Was Owned by the CIA” »
Jim Sanborn, who designed the Kryptos sculpture in a CIA courtyard, has released another clue to the still-unsolved part 4. I think he’s getting tired of waiting. Did we mention Mr. Sanborn is 74? Holding on to one of the world’s most enticing secrets can be stressful. Some would-be codebreakers have appeared at his home. … Read More “A New Clue for the Kryptos Sculpture” »
Artist Katie Holten has developed a tree code (basically, a font in trees), and New York City is using it to plant secret messages in parks. Powered by WPeMatico
Yesterday’s Microsoft Windows patches included a fix for a critical vulnerability in the system’s crypto library. A spoofing vulnerability exists in the way Windows CryptoAPI (Crypt32.dll) validates Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) certificates. An attacker could exploit the vulnerability by using a spoofed code-signing certificate to sign a malicious executable, making it appear the file was … Read More “Critical Windows Vulnerability Discovered by NSA” »
There’s a new, practical, collision attack against SHA-1: In this paper, we report the first practical implementation of this attack, and its impact on real-world security with a PGP/GnuPG impersonation attack. We managed to significantly reduce the complexity of collisions attack against SHA-1: on an Nvidia GTX 970, identical-prefix collisions can now be computed with … Read More “New SHA-1 Attack” »
This just in: We are pleased to announce the factorization of RSA-240, from RSA’s challenge list, and the computation of a discrete logarithm of the same size (795 bits): RSA-240 = 12462036678171878406583504460810659043482037465167880575481878888328 966680118821085503603957027250874750986476843845862105486553797025393057189121 768431828636284694840530161441643046806687569941524699318570418303051254959437 1372159029236099 = 509435952285839914555051023580843714132648382024111473186660296521821206469746 700620316443478873837606252372049619334517 * 244624208838318150567813139024002896653802092578931401452041221336558477095178 155258218897735030590669041302045908071447 […] The previous records were RSA-768 (768 bits) in December 2009 [2], and a … Read More “RSA-240 Factored” »
Really interesting research: TPM-FAIL: TPM meets Timing and Lattice Attacks, by Daniel Moghimi, Berk Sunar, Thomas Eisenbarth, and Nadia Heninger. Abstract: Trusted Platform Module (TPM) serves as a hardware-based root of trust that protects cryptographic keys from privileged system and physical adversaries. In this work, we per-form a black-box timing analysis of TPM 2.0 devices … Read More “TPM-Fail Attacks Against Cryptographic Coprocessors” »
In an extraordinary essay, the former FBI general counsel Jim Baker makes the case for strong encryption over government-mandated backdoors: In the face of congressional inaction, and in light of the magnitude of the threat, it is time for governmental authorities — including law enforcement — to embrace encryption because it is one of the … Read More “Former FBI General Counsel Jim Baker Chooses Encryption Over Backdoors” »