Shocking the encryption market is not easy to do, but officials at Voltage Security must hope their new approach to encryption will do exactly that.
The company's flagship SecureData product uses a cryptographic technique Voltage Security calls Format-Preserving Encryption. SecureData was first released to the public in fall of 2007, though the company waited until now to speak about it publicly.
In 1991, Phillip Zimmermann developed a humble-sounding electronic encryption technology known as Pretty Good Privacy. In fact, it was very good--so good that not even the federal government has been able to crack it, a fact that has made Zimmermann a folk hero to privacy advocates and a headache to law enforcement.
The makers of a network security device that uses quantum cryptography have an ingenious plan to gain government approval despite the absence of standards specific to the technology.
Senetas, the Australian developer of the CypherNet Cerberis encryption device, has a partnership with quantum cryptography leader id Quantique. The two companies hope to gain early accreditation for Cerberis from Australia's Defence Signals Directorate (DSD).
Call it the Harold and Kumar effect.
Now that Blu-ray has won the format war, the public and security industry will get a chance to see how well the novel encryption scheme that Blu-ray publishers and manufacturers works.
What makes the strategy somewhat novel is that is relies as much on consumer tastes and behavior as it does on technology, according to Paul Kocher, president and chief scientist of Cryptography Research, which helped devise the strategy.
An encryption code used to protect billions of credit cards, subway passes and security badges is safe no more.
A University of Virginia graduate student and two fellow hackers say they have cracked the code used for tiny chips found inside many "smartcards" with readily available equipment that cost less than $1,000.
Twenty-six-year-old Karsten Nohl and his two German partners dismantled the chip and mapped out its secret security algorithm. They ran the formula through a computer program and broke the encryption after a few hours.
A research team at Princeton University has found a method to break into an encrypted hard drive to access protected information.
The method involves freezing the DRAM or Dynamic Random Access Memory in a computer. Freezing the memory can be easily done by spraying the memory chips with the cold canned air found in duster spray. Researchers said in a report published on Thursday that doing this, allows the chip to retain data for minutes or even hours after the computer is out of power.
BitLocker, meet UnBitLocker.
Word arrives from The Electronic Frontier Foundation that a crack team of researchers - including the Foundation's own Seth Schoen - have discovered a gaping security flaw in everyday disk encryption technologies, including Microsoft's BitLocker as well as TrueCrypt, dm-crypt, and Apple's FileVault.
If a machine is screen-locked or left in sleep or hibernation mode, Schoen and his cohorts proclaim, an attacker can circumvent disk encryption simply by powering the machine down and quickly re-booting to an external hard drive.
The use of data encryption could make organizations vulnerable to new risks and threats, a panel of security experts warned.
Many organizations are encrypting their stored data to relieve concerns over data theft or loss - for example, U.S. mandatory disclosure laws on data breaches do not apply to encrypted data.
However, experts from IBM Internet Security Systems, Juniper, nCipher and elsewhere said that data encryption also brings new risks, in particular via attacks - deliberate or accidental - on the key management infrastructure.
German police are unable to decipher the encryption used in the Internet telephone software Skype to monitor calls by suspected criminals and terrorists, Germany's top police officer said on Thursday. Skype allows users to make telephone calls over the Internet from their computer to other Skype users free of charge.
Law enforcement agencies and intelligence services have used wiretaps since the telephone was invented, but implementing them is much more complex in the modern telecommunications market where the providers are often foreign companies.
A highly respected cryptographer warned on Friday that the increasing sophistication of computer chip design raises the risk that undetected bugs could be used to crack public key encryption systems. The warning was issued by Adi Shamir, a professor at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science. The "S" in RSA, one such public key encryption algorithm, belongs to Shamir.
