Ivan Ristic (of modsecurity fame) has published the results of an evaluation against over 900,000 websites supporting SSL. The goal of this evaluation was to see how people really use/misuse ssl in the wild, as well as report on the usage of browser protections such as the Secure cookie flag, and Strict-Transport-Security....
I came across a post on stackoverflow that I felt was worth mentioning. The person was wanting to hash user passwords and implement per user salting. A response by Dave Sherohman provided a good overview as to why using random salts (instead of just using the user's username) is a good idea....
I recently attended RSA and had a chance to see the cryptography panel. Towards the end of the panel an amusing amount of bickering began between the former NSA technical director (Brian snow) and folks such as Whit Diffie (inventor of diffie hellman key exchange), and Adi Shamir (co founder of RSA...
Steve Dispensa and Marsh Ray have published a paper describing a weakness in the TLS negotiation process. This is the same attack discussed on the IETF TLS list. From the whitepaper "Transport Layer Security (TLS, RFC 5246 and previous, including SSL v3 and previous) is subject to a number of serious man-in-the-middle...
There is a rather lengthy set of posts on using cloud based computing services as ideal venues for crypto and password cracking. Link: http://news.electricalchemy.net/2009/10/cracking-passwords-in-cloud.html Link: http://news.electricalchemy.net/2009/10/password-cracking-in-cloud-part-5.html
A new attack has been discovered against AES. "Abstract. In this paper we present two related-key attacks on the full AES. For AES-256 we show the rst key recovery attack that works for all the keys and has complexity 2119, while the recent attack by Biryukov-Khovratovich-Nikolic works for a weak key class...
"The researchers, from Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, found a way to break the SHA-1 algorithm in significantly fewer tries than previously required. Although the hash function was previously believed to withstand attempts numbering 263, the researchers have been able to whittle that down to 252, a number that puts practical attacks...
"Bryan here. The security community has been buzzing since SANS and MITRE’s joint announcement earlier this month of their list of the Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors. Now, I don’t want to get into a debate in this blog about whether this new list will become the new de facto standard...
UPDATE: I've added a link to the presentation slides and some other sites providing coverage of this. The following paper was published today at the CCC conference by Alexander Sotirov, Marc Stevens, Jacob Appelbaum, Arjen Lenstra, David Molnar, Dag Arne Osvik, and Benne de Weger. "We have identified a vulnerability in the...
"The FBI today challenged anyone in the online community to break a cipher code on its site. The code was created by FBI cryptanalysts. The bureau invited hackers to a similar code-cracking challenge last year and got tens of thousands of responses it said. A number of sites host such cipher challenges,...
"Executive Summary Skein is a new family of cryptographic hash functions. Its design combines speed, security, simplicity, and a great deal of flexibility in a modular package that is easy to analyze. Skein is fast. Skein-512 -- our primary proposal -- hashes data at 6.1 clock cycles per byte on a 64-bit...
Stefan Esser has written a great article on attacking php PRNG's. "PHP comes with two random number generators named rand() and mt_rand(). The first is just a wrapper around the libc rand() function and the second one is an implementation of the Mersenne Twister pseudo random number generator. Both of these algorithms...
My week at RSA has been fairly interesting. One of the highlights was getting to see an enigma at the NSA booth. Here is a short video I made of the NSA Museum employee explaining how it works.
"The pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) used by the Windows operating system is the most commonly used PRNG. The pseudo-randomness of the output of this generator is crucial for the security of almost any application running in Windows. Nevertheless, its exact algorithm was never published. We examined the binary code of a distribution...
"TJX’s failure to upgrade its encryption system allowed the electronic eavesdropping beginning in July 2005 and continuing for a year and a half, the report says. At least 45 million credit and debit cards were exposed to potential fraud, according to an Associated Press story" Article Link: http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/hdw/?p=945
Piotr Musial writes "Ccrp was designed to be a highly secure private key encryptor for small files and messages, and uses bit-move logic as the primary means of "scrambling" the plaintext. Ccrp also uses a lookup table instead of a pseudorandom bit generator, and so to obtain good se curity with that...
