According to security experts, an algorithm for generating random numbers that is included in an official standard documented by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) could potentially include a backdoor planted by the NSA.
In an ironic twist, a British team operating a World War II code-breaking computer has been beaten in a cipher-breaking contest by a German.
In the Cipher Challenge, a competition run by the U.K.'s National Museum of Computing on Thursday and Friday, the cipher-breaking computer Colossus had to decode encrypted radio communications intercepted from Paderborn in Germany. Competing against Colossus, which took 14 years to rebuild, were radio enthusiasts from across Europe, who had to beat the WWII code cracker using whatever computing means they had at their disposal.
The code-cracking history of World War II, and in particular the Enigma Machine story, are legendary. But a feat of equal or even greater cryptographic virtuosity has been overshadowed by that well-known tale.
Naturally, that's of interest to the hackers and tinkerers at this year's Chaos Communication Camp. Sven Moritz Hallberg reconstructed the events today for the campers here.
MIT Professor Ronald L. Rivest, who helped develop one of the world's most widely used Internet security systems, has been named the 2007 Marconi Fellow and prize-winner for his pioneering work in the field of cryptography, computer and network security.
Rivest, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, will receive the award and accompanying $100,000 prize at the annual Marconi Society Award Dinner on Sept. 28 at the Menlo Circus Club in Atherton, Calif.
In the computer printer business, everyone knows the big money comes from the sale of ink cartridges.
Most of these cartridges are made by printer manufacturers and sell for a substantial premium. Some come from unauthorized sources, sell for substantially less and attract the attention of antipiracy lawyers.
The strength of the encryption now used to protect banking and e-commerce transactions on many websites may not be effective in as few as five years, a cryptography expert has warned after completing a new distributed-computing project.
Arjen Lenstra, a cryptology professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, says the distributed computation project, conducted over 11 months, achieved the equivalent in difficulty of cracking a 700-bit RSA encryption key, so it doesn’t mean transactions are at risk — yet.
The ongoing war between content producers and hackers over the AACS copy protection used in HD DVD and Blu-ray discs produced yet another skirmish last week, and as has been the case as of late, the hackers came out on top. The hacker "BtCB" posted the new decryption key for AACS on the Freedom to Tinker web site, just one day after the AACS Licensing Authority (AACS LA) issued the key.
The cat and mouse game between the hackers and the AACS Licensing Authority continues as the latest MKB v3 Processing Key is released onto the web.
A BOFFIN in the former Spanish colony of Texas has come up with a simple way of making electronic messages that are impossible to crack.
According to New Scientist, Laszlo Kish at Texas A&M University in College Station has come up with a cunning plan that uses the thermal properties of a simple wire to create a secure communications channel which outperforms quantum cryptography keys. His invention uses thermal noise which is generated by the natural agitation of electrons within a conductor.
A 307-digit encryption key has been broken down into primes and 1024-bit RSA keys are next, according to encryption researchers. Researchers from the University of Lausanne, the University of Bonn, and NTT DoCoMo have broken a new record in discovering the prime factors of a "special" 307-digit number this month, which took 11 months and roughly 100 years of computer time. The number was cracked using the special number field sieve method developed by cryptology professor Arjen Lenstra in the 1980s.
