Updated: 2010-02-24 03:14:20
Message Authentication Codes (MACs) are special pieces of data used to prove the authenticity and integrity of a message– to show that the message originated from a certain source and that it has not been modified. Consider a scenario in which Alice wants to send Bob an email. Upon receiving the email, Bob would like [...]
Updated: 2010-02-16 11:44:20
FIPS stands for Federal Information Processing Standards, and is “run” by NIST. It is a set of standards that dictates how information is stored, processed, and managed in the federal government. It’s also leaked into the commercial sector through government contractors and the concept of “If it’s good enough for the government…”
Almost all [...]
Updated: 2010-02-10 04:33:25
Some information theory today.
Today we look at pairs $ (X,Y)$ of random variables distributed between two parties, Alice and Bob. Such correlated random variables distributed among different parties is a powerful cryptographic tool. But not all random variables are equally powerful or useful. They vary in their cryptographic utility, qualitatively and quantitatively. What I'd like to discuss in the next couple of posts is a new information theoretic measure that captures cryptographic content of pairs of correlated random variables.
Updated: 2010-01-26 15:18:18
Tor partially blocked in China | The Tor Blog
That last article lead me to this post on the TOR blog from September 15, 2009 (I am a bit late to this party). China is now blocking about 80% of the public TOR nodes.
This mostly ends a rather baffling situation where for some reason the Chinese [...]
Updated: 2010-01-26 15:13:41
Privacy Network Tor Suffers Breach | Privacy Digest
It has been reported, and the TOR folks have confirmed, that two of their core directory servers were recently compromised along with another server showing usage metrics. While it does not at first appear that the attack was aimed at compromising the TOR network, it would certainly have [...]
Updated: 2010-01-17 01:07:14
In a very broad sense, cryptography is all about controlled access to information. The more complex the overall system is, the more intricate the kinds of access to information that can manifest. This kind of complexity -- what we shall call cryptographic complexity -- is the subject of this series of blog posts. The plan for the next several weeks is to outline some of our research over the last couple of years which formalizes these questions and uncovers some (what I find) fascinating structures.
Updated: 2010-01-07 15:15:09
by Rajiv Andrade, Linux Technology Center
Since the foundation of the Trusted Computing Group, previously named Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, the pillars required to win most of today’s security challenges have been heavily developed.
The Trusted Platform Module and the Trusted Software Stack are two of these. Now that we have in our hands the required enablement, the next expected step [...]
Updated: 2010-01-05 15:41:16
NIST-certified USB Flash drives with hardware encryption cracked - The H Security: News and Features
Security firm SySS announced (in German) that it has discovered a massive vulnerability in the hardware encryption for USB thumb drives by Kingston, SanDisk and Verbatim. From the article at The H Security it looks like the problem is that all [...]
