Tag Archives: Security

Diffie-Hellman Explained with Paint

Posted on 2016-01-13 by jcs

A cornerstone of modern secure communications is the Diffie-Hellman key exchange. It solves the problem of two communicators who may not know each other and haven’t previously agreed on a key to negotiate a secret key in public. This may … Continue reading →

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A Demonstration of How Hard Cryptography Is

Posted on 2015-12-22 by jcs

In the battle over whether the government should require backdoors in cryptography products, the primary objection from those who actually know what they’re talking about is that we’re not smart enough to safely build in backdoors. That point is often … Continue reading →

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Reporters and Encryption

Posted on 2015-12-11 by jcs

Speaking of journalists, the Columbia Journalism Review gives them a good spanking for the terrible job they’re doing in covering the encryption wars. In How not to report on the encryption ‘debate’, the CJR takes reporters to task for swallowing … Continue reading →

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The TOR Attack

Posted on 2015-12-03 by jcs

Fusion has a lengthy and informative report on the recent TOR attack. To some extent, the TOR project dropped the ball and failed to understand the seriousness of what they were seeing. The real villains, though, appear to be two … Continue reading →

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Password Enforcement

Posted on 2015-10-25 by jcs

Ryan Winchester has a nice post complaining about the stupid password rules that some sites enforce. It’s not that Winchester and the rest of us aren’t in favor of stronger passwords or even that we mind some rules that might … Continue reading →

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Lenovo Yet Again

Posted on 2015-09-30 by jcs

From Irreal’s You Can’t Make This Stuff Up department we have news of Lenovo once again secreting malware on their computers. This time it’s on the top-of-the-line Thinkpad model widely assumed to be immune from this nonsense. I know lots … Continue reading →

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Turing Complete Documents

Posted on 2015-09-26 by jcs

I thought this was pretty funny until I realized it applies to my beloved Org mode too. Why is it that the first thing we do after developing a new document format is to make it Turing-complete? Seriously what is … Continue reading →

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Who Does This?

Posted on 2015-09-17 by jcs

The SANS NewsBites newsletter is reporting that Seagate’s wireless hard drives has a hardcoded password to a Telnet server in the drive’s firmware. Really? In 2015? This is really just unbelievable. It’s like Seagate’s engineers missed the last 20 years’ … Continue reading →

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The Dangers of Government Held Master Keys

Posted on 2015-09-12 by jcs

The government continues to press the tech sector to give them “golden” keys that they can use to decrypt our communications. One of the main arguments against these proposals is that they will inevitably be compromised and make us less … Continue reading →

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The Death of RC4

Posted on 2015-09-11 by jcs

I’ve always liked the RC4 cipher. It’s easy to understand and implement and has been in wide use for almost 30 years. Sadly, RC4’s run is over. It’s long been suspected that the NSA could break it and recent attacks … Continue reading →

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