New paper: “ Encryption and Globalization 15 Years Later: End-to-End Encryption and the Third Round of the ‘Going Dark’ Debate “: Abstract : This Article updates and expands on 2012 research on encryption and globalization, analyzing what the authors call “Round 3” of the Going Dark Debate: the current controversies over end-to-end …

Really interesting piece of cryptographic history : In November 2023, a large cache of his wartime papers—nicknamed the “Bayley papers”—was auctioned in London for almost half a million U.S. dollars. The previously unknown cache contains many sheets in Turing’s own handwriting, telling of his top-secret “Delilah …

France is accelerating its transition to post-quantum encryption: France’s cybersecurity agency ANSSI said on Tuesday it would stop certifying security products that lack quantum-resistant encryption, a move that will force government bodies and critical operators to shift away from older systems. Samih Souissi, ANSSI’s chief of staff …

Interesting research on a new class of weak RSA keys: keys with lots of zeros. It turns out that these keys are out in the wild. The badkeys project is an open-source service that checks public keys for known vulnerabilities. While developing this tool, Hanno collected a massive number …

The White House is drastically shortening the deadline for government agencies and organizations to adopt new quantum-resistant encryption systems that will withstand attacks that use quantum computers, as the federal government seeks to protect decades’ worth of secrets belonging to militaries, banks, governments, and most individuals on Earth. The …

The Texas Attorney General has sued Meta over allegations that the company’s WhatsApp messenger, used by more than 3 billion people, doesn’t provide the end-to-end encryption (E2EE) it has long claimed. Since at least 2016, Meta (then named Facebook) has said WhatsApp provides robust end-to-end encryption, meaning …

Migrating your TLS endpoints to Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) starts with understanding your current TLS endpoint inventory and posture. This post introduces the PQC Readiness Scanner — an automated tool that inventories your Application Load Balancer (ALB), Network Load Balancer (NLB), and Amazon API Gateway endpoints and continuously monitors their TLS …

As outlined in the AWS post-quantum cryptography (PQC) migration plan, addressing the risk of harvest now, decrypt later (HNDL) attack is an important part of your post-quantum plan. Upgrading the client-side of your workloads to support quantum-resistant confidentiality is an important aspect of your side of the PQC shared …

According to a new law, the Hong Kong police can demand that you reveal the encryption keys protecting your computer, phone, hard drives, etc.—even if you are just transiting the airport. In a security alert dated March 26, the U.S. Consulate General said that, on March 23 …

Mike Masnick points out that the recent New Mexico court ruling against Meta has some bad implications for end-to-end encryption, and security in general: If the “design choices create liability” framework seems worrying in the abstract, the New Mexico case provides a concrete example of where it leads in …

Banks, governments and tech providers urged to upgrade security because current systems will soon be obsolete Banks, governments and technology providers need to be prepared for quantum computer hackers capable of breaking most existing encryption systems by 2029, Google has warned. The tech company said in a blogpost that …

Google is dramatically shortening its readiness deadline for the arrival of Q Day, the point at which existing quantum computers can break public-key cryptography algorithms that secure decades' worth of secrets belonging to militaries, banks, governments, and nearly every individual on earth. In a post published on Wednesday, Google …

It’s hard to overstate the role that Wi-Fi plays in virtually every facet of life. The organization that shepherds the wireless protocol says that more than 48 billion Wi-Fi-enabled devices have shipped since it debuted in the late 1990s. One estimate pegs the number of individual users at …

It’s hard to overstate the role that Wi-Fi plays in virtually every facet of life. The organization that shepherds the wireless protocol says that more than 48 billion Wi-Fi-enabled devices have shipped since it debuted in the late 1990s. One estimate pegs the number of individual users at …

After twenty-six years, Microsoft is finally upgrading the last remaining instance of the encryption algorithm RC4 in Windows. of the most visible holdouts in supporting RC4 has been Microsoft. Eventually, Microsoft upgraded Active Directory to support the much more secure AES encryption standard. But by default, Windows servers have …

Microsoft is killing off an obsolete and vulnerable encryption cipher that Windows has supported by default for 26 years following more than a decade of devastating hacks that exploited it and recently faced blistering criticism from a prominent US senator. When the software maker rolled out Active Directory in …

Here’s a fun paper: “ The Naibbe cipher: a substitution cipher that encrypts Latin and Italian as Voynich Manuscript-like ciphertext “: Abstract: In this article, I investigate the hypothesis that the Voynich Manuscript (MS 408, Yale University Beinecke Library) is compatible with being a ciphertext by attempting to develop a …

A new anonymous phone service allows you to sign up with just a zip code. [...]

The International Association of Cryptologic Research—the academic cryptography association that’s been putting conferences like Crypto (back when “crypto” meant “cryptography”) and Eurocrypt since the 1980s—had to nullify an online election when trustee Moti Yung lost his decryption key. For this election and in accordance with the …

The Business of Secrets: Adventures in Selling Encryption Around the World by Fred Kinch (May 24, 2004) From the vantage point of today, it’s surreal reading about the commercial cryptography business in the 1970s. Nobody knew anything. The manufacturers didn’t know whether the cryptography they sold was …

Signal has just rolled out its quantum-safe cryptographic implementation. Ars Technica has a really good article with details: Ultimately, the architects settled on a creative solution. Rather than bolt KEM onto the existing double ratchet, they allowed it to remain more or less the same as it had been …

Here’s the summary : We pointed a commercial-off-the-shelf satellite dish at the sky and carried out the most comprehensive public study to date of geostationary satellite communication. A shockingly large amount of sensitive traffic is being broadcast unencrypted, including critical infrastructure, internal corporate and government communications, private citizens’ voice …

Today’s world requires us to make complex and nuanced decisions about our digital security. Evaluating when to use a secure messaging app like Signal or WhatsApp, which passwords to store on your smartphone, or what to share on social media requires us to assess risks and make judgments …

People in Internet security circles are sounding the alarm over the issuance of three TLS certificates for 1.1.1.1, a widely used DNS service from content delivery network Cloudflare and the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) Internet registry. The certificates, issued in May, can be used …

I wrote about this in 2023. Here’s the story : Three Dutch security analysts discovered the vulnerabilities­—five in total—­in a European radio standard called TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio), which is used in radios made by Motorola, Damm, Hytera, and others. The standard has been used in radios …