InfoSec News Blog

MSN Password Decrypter

Just for the fun of it...
This tool will decrypt the MSN password stored by the Windows operating system.

Ideal-to-Realized Security Assurance In Cryptographic Keys

Everyone asks me encryption questions regarding key rotation, storage and destruction. WindowsSecurity.com has an article beginning the encryption key conversation.

In the first installment of this two-part series, we'll cover key length, and relative concerns, such as entropy and how password etiquette affects key space complexity. We'll look at how the length of the key doesn't inherently equate to the security of the key, and why security isn't even just about keys, at all.

The right coprocessor can help with encryption

IBM's Big iron lessons, Part 6:

Encryption is a key aspect of security for any application or system. Furthermore, encryption is algorithmically complex, requiring significant resources for implementation, and most often, significant hardware acceleration. In this sixth and final installment to the Big iron lessons series, you'll get a review of the modern history of crypto and the encoding hardware and software techniques developed for mainframes that can show you the way forward.

New Cryptanalytic Results Against SHA-1

Schneier is blogging like crazy, but there's so much news to blog about.

Xiaoyun Wang, one of the team of Chinese cryptographers that successfully broke SHA-0 and SHA-1, along with Andrew Yao and Frances Yao, announced new results against SHA-1 yesterday at Crypto's rump session. (Actually, Adi Shamir announced the results in their name...

Meanwhile, NIST is holding a workshop in late October to discuss what the security community should do now. The NIST Hash Function Workshop should be interesting, indeed. (Here is one paper that examines the effect of these attacks on S/MIME, TLS, and IPsec.)

Here are Xiaoyun Wang's two papers from Crypto this week: "Efficient Collision Search Attacks on SHA-0" [PDF] and "Finding Collisions in the Full SHA-1Collision Search Attacks on SHA1" [PDF]. And here are the rest of her papers.

Terrorists, Steganography, and False Alarms

Bruce Schneier blogs that the worries about terrorists hiding messages in things such as images, documents, and television broadcasts are false alarms.

The first sign that something was amiss came a few days before Christmas Eve 2003. The US department of homeland security raised the national terror alert level to "high risk". The move triggered a ripple of concern throughout the airline industry and nearly 30 flights were grounded, including long hauls between Paris and Los Angeles and subsequently London and Washington.

But in recent weeks, US officials have made a startling admission: the key intelligence that prompted the security alert was seriously flawed. CIA analysts believed they had detected hidden terrorist messages in al-Jazeera television broadcasts that identified flights and buildings as targets. In fact, what they had seen were the equivalent of faces in clouds - random patterns all too easily over-interpreted.

[Schneier]

It's a signal-to-noise issue. If you look at enough noise, you're going to find signal just by random chance. It's only signal that rises above random chance that's valuable.

And the whole notion of terrorists using steganography to embed secret messages was ludicrous from the beginning. It makes no sense to communicate with terrorist cells this way, given the wide variety of more efficient anonymous communications channels.

I first wrote about this in September of 2001.

I have to agree, there are many more efficient ways of communicating this information. Even in a presentation Elonka gave at Defcon in 2002 showed that, yes there was a threat but no evidence could actually link the threat to a single act or usage of steganography for terrorist activities. (Although she got quite a bit of traction out of this presentation giving it at 20 different places between 2002-2003. That being said, I liked the presentation, especially the usage of stego to embed a secret message within the presentation.)

I need a fringe topic like this to associate with current high profile issues of the day so I can get on the speaking circuit more often.

Cryptographically-Secured Murder Confession

Bruce Schneier blogs about the Associated Press article:

Joseph Duncan III is a computer expert who bragged online, days before authorities believe he killed three people in Idaho, about a tell-all journal that would not be accessed for decades, authorities say.

Duncan, 42, a convicted sex offender, figured technology would catch up in 30 years, "and then the world will know who I really was, and what I really did, and what I really thought," he wrote May 13.

Police seized Duncan's computer equipment from his Fargo apartment last August, when they were looking for evidence in a Detroit Lakes, Minn., child molestation case.

At least one compact disc and a part of his hard drive were encrypted well enough that one of the region's top computer forensic specialists could not access it, The Forum reported Monday.

[Schneier]

This is the kind of story that the government likes to use to illustrate the dangers of encryption. How can we allow people to use strong encryption, they ask, if it means not being able to convict monsters like Duncan?

But how is this different than Duncan speaking the confession when no one was able to hear? Or writing it down and hiding it where no one could ever find it? Or not saying anything at all? If the police can't convict him without this confession -- which we only have his word for as existing -- then maybe he's innocent?

Technologies have good and bad uses. Encryption, telephones, cars: they're all used by both honest citizens and by criminals. For almost all technologies, the good far outweighs the bad. Banning a technology because the bad guys use it, denying everyone else the beneficial uses of that technology, is almost always a bad security trade-off.

EDITED TO ADD: Looking at the details of the encryption, it's certainly possible that the authorities will break the diary. It probably depends on how random a key Duncan chose, although possibly on whether or not there's an implementation error in the cryptographic software. If I had more details, I could speculate further.

CRYPTO 2005: The 25th Annual International Cryptology Conference

I learned all too late that Crypto 2005 was going on at UC Santa Barbara. It looks like it was interesting. CRYPTO 2005 is sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR).

Update: Schneier blogs
Chinese cryptographer Xiaoyun Wang, the woman who broke SHA-1 last year, was unable to attend the Crypto conference to present her paper on Monday. The U.S. government didn't give her a visa in time:

On Monday, she was scheduled to explain her discovery in a keynote address to an international group of researchers meeting in California.

But a stand-in had to take her place, because she was not able to enter the country. Indeed, only one of nine Chinese researchers who sought to enter the country for the conference received a visa in time to attend.

NIST is sponsoring a workshop on hash functions in October.

Encrypted VOIP Phone

Phil Zimmermann releases the 'Zfone' encryption program designed to prevent snooping.

Bruce Schneier blogs:

Phil Zimmermann (of PGP fame) is about to debut his encrypted VOIP phone project. I presume it will be free and open source, and that the cryptography will be strong enough for any application. I don't know when it will be released, but it's certainly an excellent idea.

Strengthening Quantum Cryptography by Putting On Blinders

You may know by now I have a personal interest in cryptography and especially (as of late) the quantum side of things. Here are some recent revelations in the field:

A Korea-UK team (contact Myungshik Kim, Queen's University, Belfast, m.s.kim@qub.ac.uk , or Chilmin Kim, Paichai University) has introduced a method for preventing several clever attacks against quantum cryptography, a form of message transmission that uses the laws of quantum physics to make sure an eavesdropper does not covertly intercept the transmission. Making the message sender and receiver a little blind to each other's actions, the researchers have shown, can bolster their success against potential eavesdroppers.

[via Physics News Update from Linux Security]

In quantum cryptography, a sender (denoted as Alice) transmits a message to a receiver (called Bob) in the form of single photons each representing the 0s and 1s of binary code. If an eavesdropper (appropriately named Eve) attempts to intercept the message, she will unavoidably disturb the photon through the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which says that even the gentlest observation of the photon will perturb the particle. This will be instantly detectable by Alice and Bob, who can stop the message and start again. Quantum cryptography is already being used in the real world and is even available commercially as a way for companies to transmit sensitive financial data.

But in its real-world implementation, a weak pulse of light (rather than a perfect stream of single photons) is sent down a transmission line that is "lossy," or absorbs photons. So feasible attacks on quantum cryptography include the pulse-splitting attack (in which Eve splits a transmitted pulse into two pulses and examines one of them for information), the pulse-cloning attack (in which a transmitted pulse is copied to relatively high accuracy and then inspected for its information), and the "man-in-middle" or impersonation attack, in which Eve could impersonate Alice or Bob by intercepting the transmission and acting as sender or receiver.

A new paper proposes a solution to these three attacks by proposing a technique called "blind polarization." In this technique, Alice and Bob verify their identities to each other in a rather paradoxical way, by performing some actions that is their own private information. Yet these actions make the message completely indecipherable to a third party. Alice creates a pair of pulses, but with random polarizations (polarization indicates the direction or angle in which each pulse's electric field points relative to some reference, such as a horizontal line) Alice sends the pulses to Bob, who does not know the polarizations.

Nonetheless, without measuring the polarization values, Bob is able to rotate the polarization of one pulse by one amount and the other pulse by another amount, but he doesn't tell Alice which pulses got which treatment. Alice receives the pulses, and then encodes them with a message (representing the binary value 0 or 1, which could stand for "no" or "yes"), then blocks one of the pulses, without telling Bob which one was blocked. Bob then reverses the various polarizations by a certain amount to get the desired message. The various polarization adjustments are designed in such a way that either pulse Alice sends will yield the desired information.

According to researcher Myungshik Kim, Alice has her own private information on which pulse is blocked, while Bob has his own private information on which pulse he rotated by a given amount. Once Alice begins the transmission, there is no way for Eve to have this private information which makes their protocol effective against the man-in-middle and other attacks. (Kye et al., Physical Review Letters, upcoming article).

This paper is the latest in a wave that plugs up potential vulnerabilities in quantum cryptography (for an example of using "quantum decoys" to thwart attacks, see Lo et al., Physical Review Letters, 17 June 2005)

Six Rules for Encrypting Your Enterprise Data

With regulations such as GLBA, HIPAA and PCI coming down the pipe it's good to know how to best encrypt and thus secure your critical databases. Here a whitepaper [PDF] on just that:

Abstract: Regulatory compliance requirements for protecting sensitive data and valuable digital information assets have led many companies to consider encryption. While encryption algorithms are well standardized, the myriad of solutions designed to secure information leave many security architects unsure which approach is best for their environment. This document provides an introduction to planning for data encryption by offering six fundamental rules that should be considered prior to deployment.

(Free registration required.)

[via Help Net Security]

IEEE Cipher Newsletter (July 18)

The latest Cipher newsletter (July) was just brought online. It includes some of the following:
* Gene Spafford's article about the release of CERIAS archives on CD
* Robert Bruen's review of Windows Server 2003 Security A Technical Reference by Roberta Bragg
* Robert Bruen's review of Apache Security by Ivan Ristic
* Call For Papers: Nature-Inspired Computation in Cryptology and Computer Security
* Call For Papers: EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, Special Issue on Wireless Network Security
* Cipher's complete calls-for-papers and calendar

Keeping email under lock and (public) key

This article from NewsForge makes me wonder when Microsoft and PGP will get together to create individually PGP encrypted mailboxes.

With governments and law enforcement organizations pushing for increasingly intrusive monitoring and logging of business email messages, network administrators are put in an uncomfortable situation. Even disregarding privacy implications, such systems pose security problems at least as serious as those they attempt to solve. A "master archive" of emails is after all an extremely tempting target to external hackers, but it also has staggering potential for internal abuse. Ideally, we would want no centralized mail logs, but legal and corporate requirements mandate suitable record-keeping in the case of an internal or external audit. One way to meet both goals is by encrypting the archive using public key cryptography.

[via Help Net Security]

Update: Global Security Watch has some nice links on this.

Random Number Generators: what do you need one for?

Although unimportant to most of us, I like things like this paper describing random number generators.

Random Number Generators are a vital part of all modern operating systems. Being computers a deterministic system, random numbers are used where a non-deterministic input is required. An obvious use is virtual dice rolling for gambling systems, but if you don’t plan on running an online casino, what do you need one for?

If you still can't get enough of the random numbers then run out and buy the book A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates. You really have to be a fanatic though. Here's one of the Amazon reader reviews:

Wow! The 1,000,000 random digits produced by the Rand Corporation are some of the best random digits out there! I was amazed at some of their selections. For example: would YOU have conceived of the sequence 35462? Or 239877687468? Or 776834689765872643756324876 (one of my personal favorites). This is fine, fine work. Kudos to the folks at Rand on this most fascinating tract that truly keeps one on the edge of his seat.

[via Help Net Security]

Encrypt Data or Invite Disaster

I've been saying forever that encrypting sensitive data is one of the best (of many) security measures you can implement. Now Datamation agrees.

This is not to say that encryption is a silver-bullet, but it goes a long way to securing your data. If Citigroup encrypted their data, 4 million consumer records, stored on magnetic computer tapes, would have been protected.

[via Security-Protocols]

Help Net Security also has an article on Encryption - The Missing Defence Tool In Many Companies’ Security Policy

SHA Cryptanalysis Paper Online

Schneier blogs about the Chinese researchers who broke the SHA-1 hash function. Here's and update:

They will present it at the Crypto conference in August. I believe they didn't post it because Crypto requires that submitted papers not be previously published, and they misunderstood that to mean that it couldn't be widely distributed in any way.

Their original notice. [PDF]
Cryptome has a copy of the paper on the web "Finding Collisions in the Full SHA-1," by Xiaoyun Wang, Yiqun Lisa Yin, and Hongbo Yu.

Block Ciphers and Initialization Vectors (IVs)

Yum! I love talking about encryption and here's a good explination of initialization vectors and why they are so important. Click now and you'll get an definition of XOr to boot!

More MD5 Collisions

Bruce Schneier warns:

Two researchers from the Institute for Cryptology and IT-Security have generated PostScript files with identical MD5-sums but entirely different (but meaningful!) content. (Other MD5 attacks are summarized here.)

Now this is something interesting. Until now all hash collisions were statistically insignificant. Previously any collisions were between two pieces of data: one was meaningful (legal contract, credit card number, etc.) and another that was gibberish.

New hack cracks 'secure' Bluetooth devices

Cryptographers have discovered a way to hack Bluetooth-enabled devices even when security features are switched on. The discovery may make it even easier for hackers to eavesdrop on conversations and charge their own calls to someone else’s cellphone.

During pairing, two Bluetooth devices establish the 128-bit secret “link key” that they then store and use to encrypt all further communication. The first step requires the legitimate users to type the same secret, four-digit PIN into both devices. The two devices then use this PIN in a complex process to arrive at the common link key.

Whitehouse showed in 2004 that a hacker could arrive at this link key without knowing the PIN using a piece of equipment called a Bluetooth sniffer. This can record the exchanged messages being used to derive the link key and feed the recordings to software that knows the Bluetooth algorithms and can cycle through all 10,000 possibilities of the PIN. Once a hacker knows the link keys, Whitehouse reasoned they could hijack the device.

But pairing only occurs the first time two devices communicate. Wool and Shaked have managed to force pairing by pretending to be one of the two devices and sending a message to the other claiming to have forgotten the link key. This prompts the other device to discard the link key and the two then begin a new pairing session, which the hacker can then use.

From Boing Boing: Link to TechWorld story, here's more from Bruce Schneier's blog, and here is the paper: Cracking the Bluetooth PIN, by Yaniv Shaked and Avishai Wool.
Bluespam is one tool used to sniff out discoverable devices with default PINs: Link (Palm OS). More are here: Link.

Seagate's Drive Plans Include 500 GBs, Encryption

ExtremeTech reports that Seagate Technology unveiled its 2005 lineup on Wednesday, which takes drives to the half-terabyte level and introduces a product family that encrypts data.

Seagate plans to enhance its Momentus lineup further with the Momentus FDE, a 2.5-inch drive with the capability to encrypt is data. Encrypting the information will make a stolen notebook less valuable to thieves, as well as preventing identity theft and the loss of sensitive corporate data, Pait said.

The encryption scheme used will be a "4C" method, Pait said, apparently the one designed by 4C Entity LLC to allow data access only by the approved system, in much the same way digital music files may be restricted to certain playback devices.

Crypto wars are over, and we've won!

Politech writes:

On 25th May 2005, Part I of the Electronic Communications Act 2000
will be torn out of the statute book and shredded, finally removing
the risk of the UK Government taking powers to seize encryption keys.

The crypto wars started in the 1970s when the US government started
treating cryptographic algorithms and software as munitions and
interfering with university research in cryptography. In the early
1990s, the Clinton administration tried to get industry to adopt the
Clipper chip - an encryption chip for which the government had a
back-door key. When this failed, they tried to introduce key escrow - a policy that all encryption systems should leave a spare key with a 'trusted third party' that would hand the key over to the FBI on
demand. They tried to crack down on encryption products that did not
contain key escrow. When software developer Phil Zimmermann developed
PGP, a free mass-market encryption product for emails and files, the
US government even started to prosecute him, because someone had
exported his software from the USA without government permission.

Encryption as Evidence of Criminal Intent

Bruce Schneier says,

An appeals court in Minnesota has ruled that the presence of encryption software on a computer may be viewed as evidence of criminal intent.

I am speechless.

* The complete text is online.

Bruce took the words out of my mouth. That's like saying owning bullets makes you a terrorist mastermind! What is this world coming to when we deem anything we do not understand as evil?

How many of you would fall under this category?

UPDATE:
Jennifer Granick weighs in on this topic via her blog The Shout.

Bruce Schneier on Cryptography

An interview with Bruce Schneier on some current trends in cryptography.

[self censorship], Bruce Schneier has some good things to say and is one smart cookie. I enjoy that the interview talks about both Elliptic-Curve problems and show Bruce's use of good analogies. I wrote a research paper about seven years ago about elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), requiring me to learn number theory and the other forms of mathematically "difficult problems".

PGP goes the whole hog of encryption

John Leyden at the Register has an article on PGP's latest product:

PGP Corporation has launched a radical overhaul of its PGP desktop security suite aimed at making its products more comprehensive and easier to use. PGP Desktop 9.0, released Monday 9 May, features "automatic operation so email, instant messaging (IM), whole disk, and file encryption are secure without user interaction or training", the blurb boasts.

Top features in PGP Desktop 9.0 include:

1. PGP Whole Disk secures your entire system
2. PGP Virtual Disk secures files, folders, USB drives, and CDs
3. PGP Mail automatically encrypts and digitally signs your email and attachments
4. PGP Secure Messenger protects your AOL® IM sessions
5. PGP Zip automatically compresses and encrypts messages, attachments, and files
6. PGP Shred provides permanent and unreadable file deletion

Computer clusters off-limits to foreigners?

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing has a post:

Foreigners in America may be blocked from sitting down at any keyboard connected to any decent-sized cluster of computers unless they get an American friend to get them an "export license".

When is someone going to tell these legislators that there are no borders in the electronic world. To quote someone on NPR this week, "Our country is not an island. The oceans do not separate us from other countries or terrorists. We are all interconnected." Why are they trying to make it illegal for a foreigner to 'sit down' at a console when they can SSH (connect remotely) from anywhere on the planet.

I was at the conference, Hacking In Progress (HIP), in 1997. It was a huge hacker fest in a camp ground outside Amsterdam where the number of computers outnumbered the people two to one. I held up with the cypherpunks from Berkeley. At one point they had 'code monkeys' (people) typing cryptographic algorithms from a book into a computer. At the time it was illegal to export electronic copies of strong encryption algorithms because they were considered munitions. The one caveat is that it was perfectly legal to export the printed code because that was considered intellectual property (of the people.) So they were doing the perfectly legal thing of typing the code from the book into the computer and then compiling a "munition" all perfectly legal.

If that story interests you, check out how to become an arms trafficker.

Cryptanalysis of SHA-1

Last year was a bad year for the Secure Hash Algorithm. This year has been worse.

A key technology used in digitally signing documents and programs, the Secure Hash Algorithm, or SHA, is used by U.S. federal agencies and by corporations. It's used to reduce long documents to a smaller unique digital fingerprint, or hash, which is then signed using public-key encryption.

Last year, researchers found holes in various techniques used to create the numerical fingerprints. Among the results was a successful attack against the first version of the SHA algorithm, SHA-0.

This year, two of the researchers responsible for finding that attack--Xiaoyun Wang and Hongbo Yu of China's Shandong University--teamed up with Yiqun Lisa Yin, an independent security consultant in the United States. Together, they broke the more popular version of the algorithm, SHA-1. The paper describing that break will likely be published in May.

* c|net News.com

---

Bruce Schneier has written on this topic: Cryptanalysis of SHA-1
... his earlier blog
... the short 3 page paper [PDF]

'Thiefproof' car key cracked

Researchers have discovered cryptographic vulnerabilities in the RFID technology used in high-security car keys and petrol pump payment systems. The attack against Texas Instruments DST tags used in vehicle immobilisers and ExxonMobil's SpeedPass system was identified by experts at Johns Hopkins University and RSA Laboratories.

The algorithm used in TI's DST tags is an unpublished, proprietary cipher that uses a 40-bit key. Using a black-box reverse-engineering method, the team was able to unravel the algorithm used in the DST tags. This information allowed them to programme a commercial microchip costing less than $200 to find the secret key of a gasoline purchase tag owned by one of the researchers. Using 16 of these FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Array) devices in parallel allowed researchers to reduce search time from 10 hours to around 15 minutes.

* The Register (UK)

The Beginning of the Crypto Era

In a move that was totally expected, if a little early, Yahoo has announced that it will put its money where its mouth is and start checking Yahoo Mail with its DomainKeys system.

DomainKeys is important. It is the main implementation of the second of the two most credible approaches to SMTP authentication, specifically the use of cryptographic signatures to authenticate messages against the domains from which they were sent. The other approach—to check against the IP addresses of the servers in those domains—also moved forward recently with the second version of the Sender ID spec.

There is an IETF group called ietf-mailsig working in preliminary stages to standardize the crypto approach to SMTP authentication.

* Yahoo! News

Cryptography Research Expands Into Europe

Recognizing the strategic significance of Europe in driving the deployment of smart cards, Cryptography Research, Inc. today announced it has set up operations in the United Kingdom to provide enhanced support for European licensees of its recently launched DPA Countermeasures Licensing Program.

* bios magazine

Encrypted P2P E-mail for £25/year

The Guardian Unlimited takes a look at a new encrypted p2p system that avoids the pitfalls of PC or mail-server message copies. The company behind the effort, Jeftel, charges customers £25 ($45) a year, gives them a new ".safe" email extension, and promises their e-mail will be "leak proof" (as well as spam proof) or your money back. Obviously anyone looking to receive mail from you will need to sign up as well.

* Guardian Unlimited

NEC extends quantum cryptography range and speed

NEC researchers have developed a quantum cryptography system with sufficient speed and range to make it commercially viable. It could go on sale in the second half of 2005, the researchers said Thursday.

The system can generate quantum keys at a speed of 100k bps (bits per second) and transmit them over distances of up to 40 kilometers along commercial fiber optic lines. This combination of speed and distance is a world record, and means the system is suitable for commercial use, according to Kazuo Nakamura, senior manager of NEC's quantum information technology group at the company's Fundamental and Environmental Research Laboratories.

* PC World
* Introduction of Quantum Cryptography and Its Development [PDF]

Super-secure network could flag data danger

The work by researchers at Harvard University, Boston University and BBN Technologies is the closest scientists have come to a real-world quantum encryption system that uses light particles called photons to lock and unlock information instead of random-number "keys."

Using the technology, the scientists can swap data, send e-mail and visit one another's Web sites as their data is protected.

"It is really a futuristic technology," said Harvard project scientist John M. Myers. "Its applications are going to be a lot like the laser and the transistor, in that early people could not think of all the possible applications and uses of it."

* USA Today

Completely secure networks get one step closer

A joint research project between Fujitsu and the University of Tokyo may have discovered a way to provide complete data security between two networks.

The two have been working on a viable quantum cryptography system that would allow two parties to share encryption keys via telecommunication networks with full confidence that they have not been compromised en route.

The team has succeeded in generating and detecting a single photon at wavelengths useful for telecommunications, said Yasuhiko Arakawa, director of the Nanoelectronics Collaborative Research Center at the University of Tokyo and leader of the research project.

The reliable generation and detection of single photons is vital if quantum cryptography systems are to leave the laboratory and enter practical use, and the team has managed this through the development of a new photon generator.

* Techworld

Interview with Philip Zimmermann, PGP Creator

Phillip Zimmermann is the creator of Pretty Good Privacy, an e-mail encryption software package. Originally designed as a human rights tool, PGP was published for free on the Internet in 1991. This made Zimmermann the target of a three-year criminal investigation, because the government said it violated U.S. export restrictions for cryptographic software.

Network Associates Inc. (NAI) acquired his company, PGP Inc., in December 1997, where he stayed on for three years as senior fellow. In August 2002 a new company called PGP Corp. acquired PGP from NAI. Zimmermann now advises the PGP board and is enjoying his status as a consultant, but said he would consider starting another company focused on - what else? - encryption.

Recently, internetnews.com sat down with Zimmermann at the e-Mail Technology Conference in San Francisco to talk about e-mail, the controversial "Do-Not-Spam" list and how technologists can protect privacy and still make money.

* Internet News

HNS Audio Learning Session: Encryption Applied

In this 8:13 minutes long audio learning session, Alex van Someren, Chief Executive Officer at nCipher, talks about the process of encryption, the difference between symmetric and asymmetric encryption, need for hardware crypto accelerators and more.

Download the session (5.64 MB) in MP3 format.

Tag Encryption for Libraries

To protect patrons’ privacy, a new system encrypts data stored on a book’s RFID tag.

Library systems specialists Library Automation Technologies (LAT) has developed an encryption system for RFID communications. Although the encryption system is designed to be used for its RFID-enabled FlashScan self-checkout, which library patrons use to take out tagged books without the assistance of library staff, the company believes it could go on to be used in host of other RFID implementations.

The company's new FlashScan RFID Encryption Envelope (FREE) is designed to provide libraries implementing RFID with a way to protect patron privacy.

* RFID Journal

How to use cryptography in computer security

Cryptography is the mathematics underlying computer security. While a Ph.D. in cryptography is hardly a requirement for keeping one's systems secure, an understanding of the basics helps in decision making about security, both for system administrators and IT managers. This article presents a non-technical overview of a few key concepts in cryptography that are relevant to consumers of security solutions. I then look at some widespread myths about cryptography, and gives advice on practical matters relating to cryptography.

* IT Manager's Journal

XML Digital signatures in a nutshell

Digital signatures are widely used as security tokens, not just in XML. In this article, we look at how to create a digital signature and the way that digital signatures are constructed.We examine the current W3C XML digital signature and consider the effects of the structure of this XML-specific tool.The chapter concludes by finding where this construct fits into overall XML security and its potential uses.

* Linux Exposed

Crypto-Gram Newsletter (June)

In this issue:
--Breaking Iranian Codes
--Biometric IDs for Airport Employees
--Crypto-Gram Reprints
--Microsoft and SP2
--News
--Cell Phone Jamming and Terrorist Attacks
--Photographing Subways and Terrorist Attacks
--Counterpane News
--The Witty Worm
--Comments from Readers

* Bruce Schneier: Crypto-Gram Newsletter

Breaking codes: An impossible task?

Recent reports that the United States had broken codes used by the Iranian intelligence service have intrigued experts on cryptology because a modern cipher should be unbreakable. Four leading British experts told BBC News Online that the story, if true, points to an operating failure by the Iranians or a backdoor way in by the National Security Agency (NSA) - the American electronic intelligence organisation.

The reports, from Washington, suggested that the Iranians had been tipped off by Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi political leader with links to Iran. He is said to have learned about the code-breaking from an American official who was drunk.

* BBC News

Editor's Note:
This is an excellently written piece and very comprehensive. One of the secret agencies was obviously involved in the writing of it because it mentions the three "Bs" - burglary, blackmail and bribery.

'Father of the computer' honoured

The father of the modern computer is being honoured, 50 years after he died in tragic circumstances.

Alan Turing was one of the pioneers of computer science, and his work helped make the modern PC a reality.

He was also one of the secret code breakers working at Bletchley Park during the Second World War.

He killed himself on 7 June 1954, by eating an apple he laced with cyanide. On Monday, a blue plaque will be erected outside his home in Cheshire.

* BBC
* The Register

Editor's Note:
One of the most influential cryptographers of his century, and he killed himself because society ostracized him based on his homosexuality.

When PGP signatures can be misleading

The trust that PGP signatures generates can be deceptive, one researcher, a regular poster to the full-disclosure vulnerability mailing list, has discovered.

Gadi Evron, an information security researcher based in Israel, generally signs his posts to the list with his PGP signature, due to the fact that his email address is constantly used by spammers. Anyone who wants to verify an signed email is actually from the person claiming to send it, can do so.

What he did not reckon was that someone would try to use his PGP signature inside a spam email to impersonate him.

Ironically, the spammer in question copied his PGP signature from a message which he had sent on May 1 - about a new mailing list he had created called Spam Research.

* smh.com.au

New Largest Prime Found: Over 7 Million Digits

On May 15, 2004, Josh Findley discovered the 41st known Mersenne Prime, 2 to the 24,036,583th power minus 1. The number is nearly a million digits larger than our last find and is now the largest known prime number! Josh's calculation took just over two weeks on his 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 computer. The new prime was verified by Tony Reix in just 5 days using only half the power of a Bull NovaScale 5000 HPC running Linux on 16 Itanium II 1.3 GHz CPUs. A second verification was completed by Jeff Gilchrist of Elytra Enterprises Inc. in Ottawa, Canada using eleven days of time on a HP rx5670 quad Itanium II 1.5 GHz CPU server at SHARCNET. Both verifications used Guillermo Ballester Valor's Glucas program.

* Slashdot

RSA Security Touts Success With Web Services Federation

RSA Security said it has successfully tested complete interoperability of the WS (Web Services)-Federation specification. Several vendors including Microsoft and IBM participated in the test, the firm said.

"It's one thing for one company to claim that interoperability works," said Brian Breton, RSA Security, senior product marketing manager at RSA Security. "It's another thing to test interoperability among (several) vendors. They all implemented this." The WS-Federation is an effort to create a specification that will enable individuals and enterprises to authenticate each other quickly on many heterogeneous IT infrastructures.

* Yahoo! news

Ultimate geek challenge at IPSC

The 2004 Internet Problem Solving Contest (IPSC) kicks off this Friday. Hundreds of programmers from around the world will compete to develop the most efficient and elegant ways of solving a set of problems. In true geek style, competitors battle for bragging rights, not a prize.

This is the sixth year in a row the contest has been held, and it has grown to become one of the world's largest online programming contests. Last year more than 600 people from 50 countries joined the competition.

* The Register

EU To Counter Echelon With Quantum Cryptography?

An article on Security.ITWorld.com seems to outline a coming information arms race. The European Union has decided to respond to the Echelon project by funding research into supposedly unbreakable quantum cryptography that will keep EU data out of Echelon's maw. Leaving aside the question of whether such a thing is possible, the political implications are troubling, indicating a widening rift within the Western world. Interestingly, the UK is part of the EU, but its intelligence services are among Echelon's sponsors.

* Slashdot

Student Uncovers US Military Secrets

According to The Register, An Irish graduate student has uncovered words blacked-out of declassified US military documents using nothing more than a dictionary and text analysis software. Claire Whelan, a computer science student at Dublin City University was given the problems by her PhD supervisor as a diversion. David Naccache, a cryptographer with Gemplus, challenged her to discover the words missing from two documents: one was a memo to George Bush, and another concerned military modifications to civilian helicopters.

Attacking WinZip AES Encryption

As another tidbit from Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram, remember back in January when WinZip was Slashdotted for moving forward with its new AES-based encryption technology? Everything sounded good since we all knew that AES is secure, right? Well, a cryptographer took a look at how WinZip uses AES and found lots of problems. Regardless of how many people actually plan to use WinZip encryption, the lesson, according to Schneier, is that "cryptography is hard, and simply using AES in a product does not magically make it secure." So how can we distinguish between an application that simply uses the right buzzwords, like AES, from an application that is actually secure?

* Slashdot

Acoustic cryptanalysis

By Adi Shamir and Eran Tromer

A powerful method for extracting information from supposedly secure systems is side-channel attacks: cryptanalytic techniques that rely on information unintentionally leaked by computing devices. Most side-channel attack research has focused on electromagnetic emanations (TEMPEST), power consumption and, recently, diffuse visible light from CRT displays. The oldest eavesdropping channel, namely acoustic emanations, has received little attention. Our preliminary analysis of acoustic emanations from personal computers shows them to be a surprisingly rich source of information on CPU activity.

RSA founders give perspective on cryptography

M.E. Kabay, Network World
The famous cryptographers Leonard Adleman, Ronald Rivest, and Adi Shamir - the developers of the RSA encryption code - received the Association for Computing Machinery's 2002 Turing Award "for their seminal contributions to the theory and practical application of public-key cryptography." Their Turing Award lectures, given last June, are available online.

Rivest, Shamir and Adleman implemented public-key cryptography in the 1970s following the landmark work of Whitfield Diffie, Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle. They then founded RSA Security, which became one of the most respected security companies in the world.

The distinguished scientists' lectures are available online in a variety of formats.

* Computerworld