James Comey stated the obvious today. He suggested, “There is no such thing as absolute privacy in America.” Does this shock anyone? Does this even disappoint anyone? It doesn’t shock or disappoint me. And I’m…
Microsoft’s operating systems offer two kinds of encryption: device encryption, which encrypts an entire disk, and Bitlocker, which offers the user a chance to configure how the encryption should be done and where it should…
For almost four decades now, we’ve relied on public-key encryption to secure the keys we use to encrypt our data. The most popular form of public-key encryption, RSA, depends entirely on how difficult it is…
Securing data isn’t easy. If it were, then attacks like this one wouldn’t be occurring so regularly. The fact of the matter is that so much time, effort, and money are spent trying to secure the…
An interesting paper (summarized quite well in the MIT Technology Review) presents a new technique for discovering the keys used by popular encryption tools. By measuring the variation in voltage at various points on a computer’s case as it runs…
I feel a little better now. After blogging about how my world was coming to an end because my faith in the mathematics of encryption had been shaken, a graduate of ours who read my…
To paraphrase the 1991 video game Zero Wing, “all your [bytes] are belong to us” Even if you think you’ve encrypted your data like a good Internet citizen should, you’re pwned.. At least that’s what the…
Do you remember the gas station scene in Tommy Boy? Richard went into the convenience store to ask for directions to Davenport while Tommy tried to fill up the car. The car was too far…
I’ve been impressed with what I’ve seen and used from Google Cloud Storage so far. With very little effort, you can leverage Google’s massive storage and processing infrastructure to create mobile apps that store, process, and…
If the mathematicians have their way, the days are numbered for two stalwarts of secure data exchange on the Internet: RSA encryption and the Diffie-Hellman algorithm. This article reports that industry experts predict that Diffie-Hellman…