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: encryption
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The BBC is reporting a vulnerability in the Let’s Encrypt certificate service: In a notification email to its clients, the organisation said: “We recently discovered a bug in the Let’s Encrypt certificate authority code. “Unfortunately, this means we need to revoke the certificates that were affected by this bug, which includes one or more of … Read More “Let’s Encrypt Vulnerability” »
There’s a vulnerability in Wi-Fi hardware that breaks the encryption: The vulnerability exists in Wi-Fi chips made by Cypress Semiconductor and Broadcom, the latter a chipmaker Cypress acquired in 2016. The affected devices include iPhones, iPads, Macs, Amazon Echos and Kindles, Android devices, and Wi-Fi routers from Asus and Huawei, as well as the Raspberry … Read More “Wi-Fi Chip Vulnerability” »
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
This is new from Reuters: More than two years ago, Apple told the FBI that it planned to offer users end-to-end encryption when storing their phone data on iCloud, according to one current and three former FBI officials and one current and one former Apple employee. Under that plan, primarily designed to thwart hackers, Apple … Read More “Apple Abandoned Plans for Encrypted iCloud Backup after FBI Complained” »
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” »
Interesting research: SRLabs founder Karsten Nohl, a researcher with a track record of exposing security flaws in telephony systems, argues that RCS is in many ways no better than SS7, the decades-old phone system carriers still used for calling and texting, which has long been known to be vulnerable to interception and spoofing attacks. While … Read More “Security Vulnerabilities in the RCS Texting Protocol” »
Back in 1998, Tim May warned us of the “Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse”: “terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and money launderers.” I tended to cast it slightly differently. This is me from 2005: Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers. Seems like you can scare any public … Read More “Scaring People into Supporting Backdoors” »