Showing only posts tagged encryption. Show all posts.

Here’s the paper no one read before declaring the demise of modern cryptography

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There’s little doubt that some of the most important pillars of modern cryptography will tumble spectacularly once quantum computing, now in its infancy, matures sufficiently. Some experts say that could be in the next couple decades. Others say it could take longer. No one knows. The uncertainty leaves …

No, The Chinese Have Not Broken Modern Encryption Systems with a Quantum Computer

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The headline is pretty scary: “ China’s Quantum Computer Scientists Crack Military-Grade Encryption.” No, it’s not true. This debunking saved me the trouble of writing one. It all seems to have come from this news article, which wasn’t bad but was taken widely out of proportion. Cryptography …

As quantum computing threats loom, Microsoft updates its core crypto library

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Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Microsoft has updated a key cryptographic library with two new encryption algorithms designed to withstand attacks from quantum computers. The updates were made last week to SymCrypt, a core cryptographic code library for handing cryptographic functions in Windows and Linux. The library, started in 2006 …

Australia Threatens to Force Companies to Break Encryption

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In 2018, Australia passed the Assistance and Access Act, which—among other things—gave the government the power to force companies to break their own encryption. The Assistance and Access Act includes key components that outline investigatory powers between government and industry. These components include: Technical Assistance Requests (TARs …

YubiKeys are vulnerable to cloning attacks thanks to newly discovered side channel

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Enlarge (credit: Yubico) The YubiKey 5, the most widely used hardware token for two-factor authentication based on the FIDO standard, contains a cryptographic flaw that makes the finger-size device vulnerable to cloning when an attacker gains temporary physical access to it, researchers said Tuesday. The cryptographic flaw, known as …

Encryption in transit over external networks: AWS guidance for NYDFS and beyond

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On November 1, 2023, the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) issued its Second Amendment (the Amendment) to its Cybersecurity Requirements for Financial Services Companies adopted in 2017, published within Section 500 of 23 NYCRR 500 (the Cybersecurity Requirements; the Cybersecurity Requirements as amended by the Amendment …

Announcing AWS KMS Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) support

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When using cryptography to protect data, protocol designers often prefer symmetric keys and algorithms for their speed and efficiency. However, when data is exchanged across an untrusted network such as the internet, it becomes difficult to ensure that only the exchanging parties can know the same key. Asymmetric key …

NIST Releases First Post-Quantum Encryption Algorithms

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From the Federal Register : After three rounds of evaluation and analysis, NIST selected four algorithms it will standardize as a result of the PQC Standardization Process. The public-key encapsulation mechanism selected was CRYSTALS-KYBER, along with three digital signature schemes: CRYSTALS-Dilithium, FALCON, and SPHINCS+. These algorithms are part of three …

512-bit RSA key in home energy system gives control of “virtual power plant”

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Enlarge When Ryan Castellucci recently acquired solar panels and a battery storage system for their home just outside of London, they were drawn to the ability to use an open source dashboard to monitor and control the flow of electricity being generated. Instead, they gained much, much more—some …

Compromising the Secure Boot Process

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This isn’t good : On Thursday, researchers from security firm Binarly revealed that Secure Boot is completely compromised on more than 200 device models sold by Acer, Dell, Gigabyte, Intel, and Supermicro. The cause: a cryptographic key underpinning Secure Boot on those models that was compromised in 2022. In …

Proton is taking its privacy-first apps to a nonprofit foundation model

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Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Proton, the secure-minded email and productivity suite, is becoming a nonprofit foundation, but it doesn't want you to think about it in the way you think about other notable privacy and web foundations. "We believe that if we want to bring about large-scale change, Proton …

7,000 LockBit decryption keys now in the hands of the FBI, offering victims hope

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Enlarge (credit: Getty Images ) The FBI is urging victims of one of the most prolific ransomware groups to come forward after agents recovered thousands of decryption keys that may allow the recovery of data that has remained inaccessible for months or years. The revelation, made Wednesday by a top …

Newly discovered ransomware uses BitLocker to encrypt victim data

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Enlarge (credit: Getty Images ) A previously unknown piece of ransomware, dubbed ShrinkLocker, encrypts victim data using the BitLocker feature built into the Windows operating system. BitLocker is a full-volume encryptor that debuted in 2007 with the release of Windows Vista. Users employ it to encrypt entire hard drives to …

Novel attack against virtually all VPN apps neuters their entire purpose

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Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Researchers have devised an attack against nearly all virtual private network applications that forces them to send and receive some or all traffic outside of the encrypted tunnel designed to protect it from snooping or tampering. TunnelVision, as the researchers have named their attack, largely …

Hackers infect users of antivirus service that delivered updates over HTTP

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Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Hackers abused an antivirus service for five years in order to infect end users with malware. The attack worked because the service delivered updates over HTTP, a protocol vulnerable to attacks that corrupt or tamper with data as it travels over the Internet. The unknown …

Hardware Vulnerability in Apple’s M-Series Chips

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It’s yet another hardware side-channel attack: The threat resides in the chips’ data memory-dependent prefetcher, a hardware optimization that predicts the memory addresses of data that running code is likely to access in the near future. By loading the contents into the CPU cache before it’s actually …

Hackers can read private AI-assistant chats even though they’re encrypted

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Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images) AI assistants have been widely available for a little more than a year, and they already have access to our most private thoughts and business secrets. People ask them about becoming pregnant or terminating or preventing pregnancy, consult them when considering a divorce …

AWS Wickr achieves FedRAMP High authorization

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) is excited to announce that AWS Wickr has achieved Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) authorization at the High impact level from the FedRAMP Joint Authorization Board (JAB). FedRAMP is a U.S. government–wide program that promotes the adoption of secure cloud services …

Apple Announces Post-Quantum Encryption Algorithms for iMessage

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Apple announced PQ3, its post-quantum encryption standard based on the Kyber secure key-encapsulation protocol, one of the post-quantum algorithms selected by NIST in 2022. There’s a lot of detail in the Apple blog post, and more in Douglas Stabila’s security analysis. I am of two minds about …

EU Court of Human Rights Rejects Encryption Backdoors

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The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that breaking end-to-end encryption by adding backdoors violates human rights : Seemingly most critically, the [Russian] government told the ECHR that any intrusion on private lives resulting from decrypting messages was “necessary” to combat terrorism in a democratic society. To back up …

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