Category Archives: Privacy

Security Review: Helios Online Voting

Posted on March 13, 2009 by Orion

The Technology The technology being evaluated is the Helios Online Voting Booth, usable at http://www.heliosvoting.org and outlined in the 2008 Usenix Secuirty paper available at the same site. The election system does not create novel cryptographic tools or algorithms, rather … Continue reading →

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Current Events: One more botnet-related legal fray

Posted on March 13, 2009 by oterod

As part of an “expose’” on cyber crime, BBC’s “Click” team took it upon themselves to hire a botnet. With the stated goal of demonstrating the power of “cyber criminals” in today’s world, the journalists purchased the use of ~22,000 … Continue reading →

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Cryptography towards a new kind of election?

Posted on March 13, 2009 by Orion

Computer scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences recently deployed the first “practical, Web-based, secure, verifiable voting system.” After testing through 2008 and early 2009, the system, dubbed “Helios,” was used for the university presidential elections at … Continue reading →

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Security Review: Google Latitude

Posted on March 13, 2009 by elenau

Google Latitude is yet another product available by the well established makers of the Gmail internet based mail system. Latitude is a web based service, running in sync with a client side application Google Gears, which allows Google to pinpoint … Continue reading →

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Security Review: Apartment Complex Rent Drop-boxes

Posted on March 13, 2009 by levya

Most people renting an apartment use a common drop-box to pay the rent. Most often this is located in an easily accessible common are like the mailboxes or near the manager’s office. The setup to be discussed here is a … Continue reading →

Posted in Physical Security, Privacy, Security Reviews | 1 Comment

Security Review: Google Voice

Posted on March 13, 2009 by eapter

Apologies for reviewing the same technology. The other Google Voice review just appeared for me, which was after I wrote my own. I did check prior to starting this review, and it wasn’t up then. Summary: ComputerWorld had an article … Continue reading →

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Current Event: ITunes vulnerability leak user credentials

Posted on March 13, 2009 by levya

The recently released ITunes 8.1 closed two major security gaps from the previous version. According to Apple, until the latest release, maliciously crafted podcasts could cause ITunes to ask user for credentials but send the username and password to a … Continue reading →

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Current Event: Telegraph website hacked

Posted on March 13, 2009 by vkirst

The Telegraph, a famous daily newspaper in the UK, was hacked into by a Romanian hacking group last week. The group exposed a weakness in the way the website queried its database for property searches and was able to obtain … Continue reading →

Posted in Current Events, Ethics, Privacy | 1 Comment

Current Event: Air Force Engineers develop BitTorrent sniffer

Posted on March 13, 2009 by ezwelty

Original article: http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2009/02/airforce-engineers-develop-bittorrent-sniffer.ars The Air Force Institute of Technology has a new method for passive BitTorrent tracking. The system attempts to read the header of BitTorrent packets, and compare the hash in the packet to a known set of bad … Continue reading →

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Face Recognition System: Clever or Creepy?

Posted on March 13, 2009 by devynp

Photo programs that could organize, recognize, and cluster people’s photos are neat because it allows the user to search for pictures. The face recognition technology has also been used to identify people. The way the system works is that the … Continue reading →

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