Tag Archives: Security

Apple Responds

Posted on 2016-02-28 by jcs

Irreal readers are certainly aware of the latest drama playing out between the FBI and Apple. The FBI applied, ex parte, to a federal magistrate for an order compelling Apple to assist the FBI in breaking into an iPhone 5C … Continue reading →

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How to Securely SSH into Your Home Network

Posted on 2016-02-09 by jcs

Karl Voit shares a nice trick with us. Suppose you want to SSH into your home server. You may be loath to open a port in your firewall and your ISP may assign you a temporary IP address that can … Continue reading →

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HUH?!?

Posted on 2016-01-23 by jcs

Remote SSH access with a hard-coded password? In a security device? Today? Who does this? UPDATE: The answer, it seems, is just about everyone.

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A Sad Security Prediction

Posted on 2016-01-22 by jcs

Those of us who care about security will find this sad but in our hearts we know it’s true: 1995: Every object in your home has a clock & it is blinking 12:00 2025: Every object in your home has a … Continue reading →

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Turn Off Adblock, Get Served Malware

Posted on 2016-01-18 by jcs

I’ve written before about the horror that is adtech. Advertisers send us megabytes of Javascript for 500 words of content so that they can track us and build profiles of our habits and preferences. When users finally tired of this … Continue reading →

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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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