Using online anonymity services such as Tor or sending encrypted e-mail and instant messages are grounds for US-based communications to be retained by the National Security Agency even when they're collected inadvertently, according to a secret government document published Thursday.
The National Security Agency's Prism surveillance system is a dangerous hostage to fortune that must be countered using public policy and not simply clever security technologies alone, privacy campaigner and encryption luminary Phil Zimmermann has argued.
It's an unexpected position for a man whose new company, Silent Circle, sells possibly the single most credible anti-surveillance service on the market not to mention writing his own chapter in the history books by inventing the legendary Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption software in the early 1990s.
Data encryption could help enterprises protect their sensitive information against mass surveillance by governments, as well as guard against unauthorized access by ill-intended third parties, but the correct implementation and use of data encryption technologies is not an easy task, according to security experts.
A federal judge who had previously declined to force a Wisconsin suspect to decrypt several hard drives believed to contain child pornography has now changed his mind. After considering new evidence, the judge wrote in an order last week (PDF) that the Milwaukee-area man now must either enter the passwords for the drives without being observed by law enforcement or government counsel or must provide an unencrypted copy of the data.
Google has announced plans to upgrade its Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates to 2048-bit keys by the end of 2013 to strengthen its SSL implementation.
Announcing the news on a blog post today, Google's director of information security engineering Stephen McHenry said it will begin switching to the new 2048-bit certificates on 1 August to ensure adequate time for a careful rollout before the end of the year.
One of the many promising applications of quantum mechanics in the information sciences is quantum key distribution (QKD), in which the counterintuitive behavior of quantum particles guarantees that no one can eavesdrop on a private exchange of data without detection.
Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is seeking developers for his file sharing service Mega, which he has revealed is also working on encrypted email and IM.
In a live chat hosted on the New Zealand Herald website, the controversial entrepreneur said the key to making encryption a global success was ease of use.
IBM just released an open source software package called HELib.
The HE stands for homomorphic encryption.
Although it doesn't sound terribly sexy or impressive, HELib is actually an interesting and important milestone in cryptography. HE is also a surprisingly relevant topic right now, with our ever-increasing attraction to cloud computing. Bear with me, and I'll try to explain.
Here in the Ars science section, we cover a lot of interesting research that may eventually lead to the sort of technology discussed in other areas of the site. In many cases, that sort of deployment will be years away (assuming it ever happens). But in a couple of fields, the rapid pace of proof-of-principle demonstrations hints that commercialization isn't too far beyond the horizon.
It’s long been known that one of the oldest and most widely used standards for encrypting web sites has some serious weaknesses. But one group of researchers has found a method that downgrades that security scheme from vaguely flawed to demonstrably breakable.
