Oct 10th, 2008 · John Lam was one of many readers to send in news that on Thursday, "at a conference in Vienna, Austria, as reported by the BBC, a European Community science working group built a quantum backbone using 200-km of standard commercial optical fiber running …
Sep 30th, 2008 · Russian police almost certainly know the identity of the programmer responsible for the frightening 'ransomware' crypto virus, Gpcode, which has hit the Internet several times since 2006, says a story at Techworld, which has tapped a Kaspersky Lab researcher. …
Aug 22nd, 2008 · An anonymous reader sends word of a paper presented a few days back by Adi Shamir, the S in RSA, that promises a new form of mathematical attack against a broad range of cryptographic ciphers. The computerworld.com.au report leans heavily on Schneier's …
Jun 3rd, 2008 · Quantum cryptography, the most secure method of transmitting data, has taken a step closer to mainstream viability with a technique that simplifies the distribution of keys. Researchers at NIST claim that the new 'quantum key distribution' method minimizes …
May 21st, 2008 · The Open Graphics Project, which we've been following since it first started looking for experts four years ago, has just announced that the OGD1 is available for preorder now. The design features 2 DVI, 256MB RAM, PCI-X, and a Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA along …
Apr 6th, 2008 · IEEE Spectrum reports that noted encryption pioneer Prof. Martin Hellman has a new passion; estimating the risk of our current nuclear weapons policies. His web site, Defusing the Nuclear Threat, asks the question, 'How risky are nuclear weapons? Amazingly, …
Mar 31st, 2008 · This article from a Swiss newspaper recounts the appearance of Christopher Tarnovsky at the European Black Hat conference (link is to a Google translation of the French original). Next month Tarnovsky will testify in a lawsuit brought by a maker of satellite …
Feb 19th, 2008 · A label on the box reading 'AES' does not ensure that your data are protected. heise examined a hard drive enclosure with an RFID key that is typical of many similar products. They found that the 128-bit AES hardware encryption claimed in advertisements …
Feb 13th, 2008 · Chris Rapier has presented a paper describing how to dramatically increase the speed of SCP networks. It appears that because SCP relies on a single thread in SSH, the crypto can sometimes be the bottleneck instead of the wire speed. Their new implementation …
Nov 15th, 2007 · Bruce Schneier has a story on Wired about the new official standard for random-number generators the NIST released this year that will likely be followed by software and hardware developers around the world. There are four different approved techniques …
Nov 15th, 2007 · The BBC is reporting that following a 14 year rebuild project, the Colossus computer is once again cracking codes at Bletchley Park." They will crack WWII era encrypted messages, and compete against modern PCs. Fun stuff for crypto nerds and history buffs.Read …
Oct 11th, 2007 · Swiss officials are using quantum cryptography technology to protect voting ballots cast in the Geneva region of Switzerland during parliamentary elections to be held Oct. 21, marking the first time this type of advanced encryption will be used for election …
Aug 31st, 2007 · Let's say I have a photograph, or a television script, or have finally perfected the water-to-gasoline conversion process, or some other piece of non-software but copywritable or patentable IP. I know I want it secured in my name, on this date, in a provable …
Aug 23rd, 2007 · An anonymous reader alerts us to research out of Belgium and Israel that claims a practical attack on the KeeLoq auto anti-theft cipher. Here are slides from a talk (PDF) at CRYPTO 2007. From the researchers' site: "KeeLoq is a cipher used in several …
Jul 1st, 2007 · Zack Melich writes with news of a new front about to open in the war printer manufacturers wage with cartridge counterfeiters, refillers, and hardware hackers. A San Francisco company, Cryptography Research Inc., is designing a crypto chip to marry cartridges …
May 27th, 2007 · Atario wrote us with a link to a New Scientist article about an innovative new way of encrypting communications. An engineer at Texas A&M may have a way to exploit the thermal properties of a wire to create a secure channel. The result could be an …
Feb 12th, 2007 · Bruce Schneier has a commentary in Wired titled An American Idol for Crypto Geeks on the US government's competition for a new cryptographic hash function to become the national standard, covered here recently. He talks about how much the competition, …
Oct 30th, 2006 · By now we know that OS X uses encrypted binaries for some critical apps like Dock, Finder and LoginWindow. Amit Singh explains the implementation of this protection scheme which makes use of AES crypto algorithm and a special memory pager in Mach. The …
Oct 28th, 2006 · Public key crypto turned 30 last night, and the biggest names in crypto turned out to celebrate at an event hosted at the Computer History Museum. Voltage Security teamed with RSA to bring together some of the most famous cryptographers of yesterday (Whitfield …
Sep 25th, 2006 · Daniel Cray writes to tell us ZDNet is reporting that OpenSSL versions up to 0.9.7j and 0.9.8b are vulnerable to a signature forgery technique. OpenSSL has already released an update fixing the problem. From the article: "The flaw only affects a particular …
