Encryption

U.S. government agencies are scrambling to plug one of their biggest security holes: sensitive information -- names, addresses and Social Security numbers, for example -- stored on laptops, handhelds and thumb drives.

In the last year, agencies have purchased 800,000 licenses for encryption software through the federal Data at Rest (DAR) Encryption program, which is run jointly by the General Services Administration and the U.S. Department of Defense.

Quantum cryptography – commonly lauded as an absolutely secure avenue of data transfer – has been broken.

The advanced technology was thought to be unbreakable due to laws of quantum mechanics that state that quantum mechanical objects cannot be observed or manipulated without being disturbed.

A British start-up company has developed an encryption technology to prevent people listening in on mobile phone calls.

While voice encryption technology is already available from companies such as General Dynamics, Cellcrypt is hoping to carve a niche for itself by bringing the price down.

Current encryption methods are far from perfect—a fact highlighted by the numerous data security breaches that have occurred over the past few years. Technological limitations in the "trusted server" model for encryption and psychological barriers hinder the robust protection of data. A trio of computer science researchers has set out to simplify encryption systems. Their research, which began in 2005, has led to a novel encryption system that they term "functional encryption" greatly simplifies the problem of key complexity.

Quantum cryptography, a new technology until now considered 100 percent secure against attacks on sensitive data traffic, has a flaw after all, Swedish researchers said Friday.

"In computer terms, we've found a bug," said Jan-Aake Larsson, an associate professor of applied mathematics at the Linkoeping University in southern Sweden.

"It was surprising," he told AFP.

"We didn't expect to find a flaw," he said, adding that he and another researcher at the university had also discovered a way to fix the problem.

Seagate is adding a self-encrypting capability to its Cheetah 15K disk drive based on a specification of the Trusted Computing Group.

The TCG Storage Architecture Core Specification 1.0 defines a way that storage system drives will recognise encryption and decryption security commands and authorisation requests, says Gianna DaGiau, Seagate's senior product marketing manager.

The functionality will be added later this year.

Scientists from the German Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum (RUB) have cracked the Keeloq-RFID encryption system. The technology is owned by semiconductor company Microchip; Keeloq systems have a high market share in car immobilizers and remote keyless entry systems as well as in building automation.

PGP Corp. has introduced an encryption application that lets enterprise users protect all the data they carry around in their smartphones.

PGP Mobile encrypts Windows Mobile-based data automatically, but still allows mobile data to be shared securely with other mobile and desktop users. The new crypto app works as part of the enterprise-wide PGP Encryption Platform, which helps to reduce the expense of managing multiple vendors' encryption keys, users, policies, and reporting tools, PGP said in a statement.

Few IT professionals need to be lectured about data security. All too frequently we hear of the theft or loss of a computer or hard drive with data stored in the clear -- without encryption.

Proving once again that every copy protection technique can be cracked in a manner of time, the venerable BD+ copy protection scheme fell this week with the release of a software package. SlySoft Software’s latest 6.4.0.0 release of AnyDVD, released on Wednesday, includes the ability to copy BD+ encrypted discs.