Encryption

Dubbed Blackphone, and featured in the video above, the handset runs a hardened version of Android called PrivatOS that has been developed by Phil Zimmermann and Jon Callas, formerly of PGP. The mobe can make standard phone calls, but will include Silent Circle's apps to encrypt messages and voice and video chat, plus secure file sharing and anonymized VPN sessions.

Although weaknesses in one pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) at the heart of a US National Security Agency (NSA) scandal have been known for years, recent media attention has given light to proof-of-concept code.

There has been a lot of news lately about nefarious-sounding backdoors being inserted into cryptographic standards and toolkits. One algorithm, a pseudo-random bit generator, Dual_EC_DRBG, was ratified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2007 and is attracting a lot of attention for having a potential backdoor. This is the algorithm that the NSA reportedly paid RSA $10 million in exchange for making it the default way for its BSAFE crypto toolkit to generated random numbers.

Computer scientists have devised an attack that reliably extracts secret cryptographic keys by capturing the high-pitched sounds coming from a computer while it displays an encrypted message.

Tim Berners-Lee is known as the gentle genius with the mild touch, a man who is strikingly modest despite having created one of the epochal inventions of the modern age, the world wide web. But get him on the subject of what the National Security Agency and its British equivalent, GCHQ, have been doing to crack encryption used by hundreds of millions of people to protect their personal data online, and his face hardens, his eyes squint and he fumes.

Microsoft is planning to encrypt some or all of the data traffic moving through its servers in an attempt to protect both its consumers and, presumably, its own corporate secrets, according to a report from the Washington Post.

The maneuver is prompted by concerns that the NSA has tapped critical communications links inside the company's networks, "people familiar with the emerging plans" told the Post.

Microsoft is moving toward a major new effort to encrypt its Internet traffic after concluding that the National Security Agency may have broken into its global communications systems, said people familiar with the emerging plans.

Despite CEO Marc Benioff’s claim that Edward Snowden’s leaks on mass surveillance were “irrelevant” for Salesforce, another executive at the cloud giant has claimed customers were keen to see improved security in response to the explosive revelations.

Benioff told journalists at the company’s Dreamforce conference this week the leaks had not been a “a major issue”, saying the customer data Salesforce dealt with was not the kind the US government typically went after.

The Cryptolocker Trojan is an evolution of "ransomware," not a revolutionary change from past criminal attempts to extort money from PC owners, a security expert said today.

And the recent media blitz about the ransomware has elements of exaggeration about it.

To say that there are a lot of people who are angry with the National Security Agency (NSA) right now would be an understatement. But the things that are getting the most political attention right now—such as the invasion of the privacy of American citizens and spying on the leaders of American allies—are just a fraction of the problem, according to cryptographer and Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society Fellow Bruce Schneier.