Category Archives: Privacy
Security Review: Helios Online Voting
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
Current Events: One more botnet-related legal fray
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
Cryptography towards a new kind of election?
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
Security Review: Google Latitude
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
Security Review: Apartment Complex Rent Drop-boxes
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
Security Review: Google Voice
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
Current Event: ITunes vulnerability leak user credentials
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
Current Event: Telegraph website hacked
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
Current Event: Air Force Engineers develop BitTorrent sniffer
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
Face Recognition System: Clever or Creepy?
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