The Encryption Working Group of the House Judiciary Committee and the House Energy and Commerce Committee has released its annual report. Observation #1: Any measure that weakens encryption works against the national interest. Observation #2: Encryption technology is a global technology that is widely and increasingly available around the world. Observation #3: The variety of … Read More “Encryption Working Group Annual Report from the US House of Representatives” »
Category: encryption
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Filippo Valsorda wrote an exellent essay on why he’s giving up on PGP. I have long believed PGP to be more trouble than it is worth. It’s hard to use correctly, and easy to get wrong. More generally, e-mail is inherently difficult to secure because of all the different things we ask of it and … Read More “Giving Up on PGP” »
Like many, I was surprised and shocked by the election of Donald Trump as president. I believe his ideas, temperament, and inexperience represent a grave threat to our country and world. Suddenly, all the things I had planned to work on seemed trivial in comparison. Although Internet security and privacy are not the most important … Read More “My Priorities for the Next Four Years” »
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” »
A fully functional four-rotor Enigma machine sold for $463,500. Wow. Powered by WPeMatico
Susan Landau has an excellent essay on why it’s more important than ever to have backdoor-free encryption on our computer and communications systems. Protecting the privacy of speech is crucial for preserving our democracy. We live at a time when tracking an individual — a journalist, a member of the political opposition, a citizen engaged … Read More “Securing Communications in a Trump Administration” »
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” »
Researchers have trained a neural network to encrypt its communications. In their experiment, computers were able to make their own form of encryption using machine learning, without being taught specific cryptographic algorithms. The encryption was very basic, especially compared to our current human-designed systems. Even so, it is still an interesting step for neural nets, … Read More “Teaching a Neural Network to Encrypt” »
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” »