As EC readers may know, I’ve been sort of a collector of breach notices, and an enthusiastic supporter of the Open Security Foundation’s DataLossDB project. Recently, I had an opportunity to further support DataLossDB, by making an additional contribution to their Primary Sources archive – a resource I find particularly valuable. Unfortunately, that contribution was…
Read More Welcome to the club!Via a tweet from @WeldPond, I was led to a Daily Mail article which discusses allegations that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg “hacked into the accounts of [Harvard] Crimson staff”. Now, I have no idea what happened or didn’t, and I will never have a FB account thanks to my concerns about their approach to privacy,…
Read More Logging practicesOrr Dunkelman, Nathan Keller, and Adi Shamir have released a paper showing that they’ve broken KASUMI, the cipher used in encrypting 3G GSM communications. KASUMI is also known as A5/3, which is confusing because it’s only been a week since breaks on A5/1, a completely different cipher, were publicized. So if you’re wondering if this…
Read More Another Week, Another GSM Cipher Bites the DustCourtesy of the BBC.
Read More AlbionThe paper is here. The very sane opening paragraph is: On December 12, 2009, we factored the 768-bit, 232-digit number RSA-768 by the number field sieve (NFS, [19]). The number RSA-768 was taken from the now obsolete RSA Challenge list [37] as a representative 768-bit RSA modulus (cf. [36]). This result is a record for…
Read More 768-bit RSA key factoredThat is all.
Read More Happy 40th to the epochSo, Adam retweets a hysterical reference to a viral email about an absolute genius of a Xmas light display made to look like an accident with a ladder, and the hapless homeowner left hanging from the gutter of his house. The email explains that the display was taken down after two days in large part…
Read More A sociologist reads a Twitter feed[Posting this here to help get the word out – Chris ] Mini MetriCon 4.5 will be a one-day event, Monday, March 1, 2010, in San Francisco, California. Through the cooperation of RSA, the workshop will be held at the University of San Francisco, within walking distance of the Moscone Center, the location of the…
Read More Mini Metricon 4.5 Call for ParticipationThe Apollo program took place at just about the right time for me. I was six (or, as I would quickly have pointed out at the time, six *and a half*) when the first lunar landing occurred, and barely ten when Apollo 17 splashed down. This was old enough to be fascinated by the technology…
Read More July 20, 1969Via CNN: Steve Bierfeldt says the Transportation Security Administration pulled him aside for extra questioning in March. He was carrying a pocket edition of the U.S. Constitution and an iPhone capable of making audio recordings. And he used them. On a recording a TSA agent can be heard berating Bierfeldt. One sample: “You want to…
Read More Ron Paul supporter inadvertently gets iPhones banned from U.S. aircraft