Monthly Archives: February 2008
Security Review: Full disk encryption
Summary The past week has seen a renewed interest on the part of the security community in the reliability of hard disk encryption. With the recent revelation that data on encrypted drives is vulnerable to unauthorized access via memory manipulation, … Continue reading
Security Researchers Crack Wireless GSM Encryption
Security researchers have announced the development of a ultra-fast method of cracking wireless GSM encryption in 30 minutes or less. The 64-bit encryption algorithm was cracked in theory over 10 years ago, but the development of new technology has exploited … Continue reading
Now that we are being listened to
The government has decided to continue wiretapping phones with assistance from phone companies. These companies are also pushing a bill for immunity from lawsuits for participating in the tapping. What is the line at which informational surveillance pushes too far … Continue reading
16 hackers got arrested in Quebec recently
Recently, the police department in Quebec, Canada, busted an international hacking network. 16 people that were between the ages of 17 and 26 were arrested and this was the biggest hacking scam in Canadian history according to the police. These … Continue reading
Cold Boot Attacks on Disk Encryption
Well-known security researcher and commentator Ed Felton and colleagues at Princeton report on a technique for breaking many whole-disk encryption schemes, including the most common ones. The attack is based upon scanning RAM for encryption keys, and is even (reported … Continue reading
Spy Satellites
Spy satellites will be used by local law enforcement to enforce the laws against United States citizens. Should this make us feel safer or more scared of our government? On the one hand I expect any government to use the … Continue reading
Security Review: Blogging at the Olympic Games
Summary: The International Olympic Committee will be granting Olympic athletes the right to blog at this year’s summer games in China, and there will be a few interesting restrictions placed on what they can say. In addition to the standard … Continue reading
Amazon’s S3 Outage: Usage spike or DDoS attack?
Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) experienced an outage on the morning of February 15th, causing inaccessible content in the thousands of websites that rely on S3 for data storage. According to Amazon’s official explanation, the outage was due to a … Continue reading
Security Review: ASIMO Robot
ASIMO is a robot that resembles a human that is created by Honda Motor Company. It was created at the Wako Fundamental Technical Research Center in Japan. The current version of this robot is version eleven. This robot, which is … Continue reading
Microsoft bad practices
Given all the Microsoft-bashing that takes place among Linux-users, I’m surprised that no one has posted an article (that I’ve seen, at least) that clearly has an anti-Microsoft bias. Despite the bias of the following article, it makes a valid … Continue reading