PDAs

Sept. 11 - "Well, I guess this is the end now. . . ." So wrote the
first Netizen to address today's tragedy on the popular
discussion group, sci.crypt. The posting was referring what
seems like an inevitable reaction to the horrific terrorist act: an
attempt to roll back recent relaxations on encryption tools, on
the theory that cryptography helped cloak preparations for the
deadly events.

WASHINGTON — Hidden in the X-rated pictures on several pornographic Web sites and the posted comments on sports chat rooms may lie the encrypted blueprints of the next terrorist attack against the United States or its allies. It sounds farfetched, but U.S. officials and experts say it's the latest method of communication being used by Osama bin Laden and his associates to outfox law enforcement. Bin Laden, indicted in the bombing in 1998 of two U.S.

Mathematician Phil Carmody, who in March of this year managed to encode the DeCSS source in a prime number, has upped the ante by producing a prime number which represents an executable version of the banned CSS descrambler.
Legally this is all a bit squishy, as the DMCA forbids us to make available an access-control circumvention device. All well and good, not that we've tended to care what the DMCA allows or forbids; but this item is also the fruit of mathematical research which the public certainly has a right to see.

U.S. Customs Service agents have arrested two men for allegedly attempting to export military-grade encryption technology to China.

Authorities on Tuesday arrested Eugene You Tsai Hsu, of Blue Springs, Mo., and David Tzu Wvi Yang, of Temple City, Calif., accusing the two of plotting to export an encryption technology designed for use exclusively by the U.S. government.

Chappell Brown, writing for EE Times reports " Engineers at Los Alamos National Laboratory have developed what they believe is a practical quantum cryptographic system. The system features two portable units that can encrypt and decrypt information transmitted via photons.

Experiments have shown that encryption keys can be sent via free-space transmission at distances of up to 6 miles. The system could be used to ensure safe communications between satellites.....

RSA Security has recently fixed a security vulnerability in the Secure
Directory Server, a component of the RSA Keon Certificate Authority
(KCA) and RSA Keon Registration Authority (KRA).

Princeton computer science professor Ed Felten spilled the beans last night, revealing his method for breaking into supposedly unbreakable digital music recordings. And the good news is, Felten didn't even have to post bail.

AFTER BEING QUELLED by the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) organization and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) earlier this year, a research paper on how to crack digital music encryption is due to be presented at the Usenix Security Conference in Washington on Wednesday.

A Dutch cryptographer who claims to have broken Intel Corp.'s encryption system for digital video says he will not publish his results because he fears being prosecuted or sued under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Niels Ferguson announced last weekend that he has successfully defeated the High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection HDCP specification, an encryption and authentication system for the DVI interface used to connect digital cameras, high-definition televisions, cable boxes and video disks players...

Video crypto standard allegedly cracked

A new report dashes any remaining illusions that 802.11-based (Wi-Fi) wireless local-area networks are in any way secure. The paper, written by three of the world's foremost cryptographers, describes a devastating attack on the RC4 cipher, on which the WLAN wired-equivalent privacy (WEP) encryption scheme is based.