On the surface, encryption has always seemed a no-brainer. Why expose confidential information to prying eyes when you could protect it by scrambling it? But even though encryption technologies have been widely available for more than 10 years, they have been slow to catch on.
Despite the best efforts of the Advanced Access Content System (AACS) Licensing Administration (AACS LA), content pirates remain one step ahead. A new volume key used by high-def films scheduled for release next week has already been cracked. The previous AACS volume key was invalidated by AACS LA after it was exposed and broadly disseminated earlier this month. The latest beta release of SlySoft's AnyDVD HD program can apparently be used to rip HD DVD discs that use AACS version 3.
Five days, that is how long the original post by Kevin Rose has remained online. There are over thirty-six thousand ?diggs? for it. In what is turning out to be an interesting look at the internet, censorship, and DRM management as a whole, the news about this story will not go away quietly in the night. That is assuming it goes away at all.
Drumming up business would seem to be an easy task for those who sell encrypted cellphones in Italy. All they have to do is browse the major newspapers for likely customers.
Piero Fassino, national secretary of the Democratic Left Party, could have benefited from an encrypted phone before comments he made regarding a sensitive bank takeover made the front pages.
Luciano Moggi, the former head of the Juventus soccer club, could have used one, too. His phone conversations, intercepted by investigators and then leaked to the media, led to Italy?s soccer game-fixing scandal.
THE group behind security measures for next-generation DVDs says it has fixed a leak that allowed hackers to discover the keys for unlocking movies on HD DVD and Blu-ray discs.
Makers of software for playing the discs on computers will offer patches containing new keys and closing the hole that allowed observant hackers to discover ways to strip hi-def DVDs of their protection.
The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology is having a competition for a new cryptographic hash function.
SHA-1 is one of the most prevalent forms of a secure hash algorithm used in the legal and security industry. Now that Professor Xiaoyun Wang and her associates in Tsinghua University and Shandong University of Technology have officially cracked the SHA-1 hashing algorithm, the fallout will begin. This won't actually be due to security concerns for the most part, but the legal ramifications may be severe.
That's the opinion of Gartner's Steve Prentice, voiced yesterday at the firm's ITxpo/Symposium in Sydney.
Prentice said PlayStation 3 will pack an impressive 207 teraflops of power under its slim hood when released locally next year. By comparison, his research indicates that the .entry level. machine from supercomputer Cray offers 230 teraflops.
"There will be millions of PlayStation 3's sold, and they will all be online," he said, predicting that the sheer computing power available between the machines will be among the largest and most powerful computers ever assembled.
Corporate america, universities and government entities alike are under the gun to stop data leakage from mobile devices gone astray. We decided to sight in on the best way to keep data safe if hardware falls into the wrong hands--full-disk encryption.
Dignitaries from the computer security field took the stage at the Computer History Museum on October 26 to commemorate the 30th anniversary of public key cryptography, wax historical about academic, governmental and commercial developments in security, and ponder the future. Panelists included persons such as Whitfield Diffie, a cryptography pioneer and chief security officer at Sun Microsystems; Notes founder Ray Ozzie, now Microsoft's chief software architect, and Brian Snow, retired director for the National Security Agency's Information Assurance Directorate.
