Collaborate Disseminate
We’re seeing car thefts in the wild accomplished through hacking: Houston police have arrested two men for a string of high-tech thefts of trucks and SUVs in the Houston area. The Houston Chronicle reports that Michael Armando Arce and Jesse Irvin Zelaya were charged on August 4th, and are believed to be responsible for more than 100 auto thefts. Police… Continue reading Hackers Stealing Cars
First, Mischa devs stole their rival’s code. Now, they may have killed its business. Continue reading Keys to Chimera crypto ransomware allegedly leaked by rival crime gang
New paper: "Physical Key Extraction Attacks on PCs," by Daniel Genkin, Lev Pachmanov, Itamar Pipman, Adi Shamir, and Eran Tromer. They recover keys acoustically, from the high-frequency "coil whine" from the circuits, from a distance of about ten meters. News article…. Continue reading Another Side-Channel Attack on PC Encryption
Last week, there was a big news story about the BlackBerry encryption key. The news was that all BlackBerry devices share a global encryption key, and that the Canadian RCMP has a copy of it. Stupid design, certainly, but it’s not news. As the Register points out, this has been repeatedly reported on since 2010. And note that this only… Continue reading BlackBerry’s Global Encryption Key
CONIKS is an new easy-to-use transparent key-management system: CONIKS is a key management system for end users capable of integration in end-to-end secure communication services. The main idea is that users should not have to worry about managing encryption keys when they want to communicate securely, but they also should not have to trust their secure communication service providers to… Continue reading CONIKS
ZDNet has an article on US government pressure on software companies to hand over copies of their source code. There’s no details because no one is talking on the record, but I also believe that this is happening. When asked, a spokesperson for the Justice Dept. acknowledged that the department has demanded source code and private encryption keys before. These… Continue reading Companies Handing Source Code Over to Governments