PDAs

The government and military are investing more heavily in encryption
technology as a defence against hackers who are beginning to
deploy more sophisticated cracking techniques.

That's the conclusion of a study by industry analysts Frost & Sullivan
who said sales of encryption technologies to military and
government agencies, along with contractors, are growing from
$176 million to a projected $457.6 million by 2007.

There is a fundamental flaw in numerous popular encrypted e-mail programs that calls into question the authenticity of digitally signed and encrypted e-mail messages, according to a security researcher who has published a paper on the subject.

But, as is usually the case in the security community, the revelation has sparked a debate over the merits of the disclosure.

Encrypting data that passes over the Internet from customers to e-commerce sites is a good thing. But it's not
necessarily enough.

In fact, personal data used in online transactions is often encrypted at the least significant time.

Virtually all cases of credit card theft happen when a malicious hacker gains access to an e-commerce site's server, and is
then able to access the database that contains customer information -- which by then is often unencrypted and exposed.

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the release of PGP 1.0.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
will ask a federal court on Wednesday to
rule that Princeton University Professor
Edward Felten and his research team have a
First Amendment right to present their
research on digital music access-control
technologies at the USENIX Security
Conference this August in Washington, DC,
despite threats from the recording

Of the three types of
authentication supported under
the IPSec Internet Key
Exchange (IKE) specification,
only digital certificate-based
authentication provides secure
access for remote users.
Digital certificates require
additional services on the
corporate network that are
collectively known as a

For years the high cost of computing power kept data-scrambling technologies out of reach for most businesses.

Encryption, the old saw went, was simply too expensive to use for anything but the most sensitive transactions, such as credit-card purchases on web sites. Companies that used it had to buy more computers just to handle the heavy mathematical computations involved in encrypting traffic they wanted kept private. Encryption, in effect, was the bottleneck that slowed down everything else.

Planet IT reports that a startup company called Andes Networks Inc claims to have developed a super-fast encryption system that the company claims will help encrypt all web traffic within a few years. The system, called the SSL accelarator system (because it focuses on the SSL layer) works by decoding encrypted traffic as it comes in, and encrypting traffic on the way out.What makes this technology interesting is that it is supposed to perform 10 times faster than existing technologies.

While browing through various sites searching for a newbie to mid level crypto read-me, I came across a pretty informative document regarding encryption, and steganography. Included in the article are neat ways to avoid having your data subjected to prying eyes, including subversive methods to almost unbreakable ciphered messages using combinations.

Ghost in the Shell.

What do the recent eFront ICQ fiasco and the recent Great Hack Attack have in common? Well, for one, judicious use of strong encryption could've conceivably prevented both catastrophes. Thus, this Feed/Plastic dialog with author Steven Levy comes at an important time. Levy is the author of a number of books, including his recent, Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government--Saving Privacy in the Digital Age.