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Posts Tagged encryption
Silent Circle Raises $50 Million
Posted by Brian in Comms, News, Threat Watch on 2/Mar/2015 13:35
From ArsTechnica:
Terms of the buyout deal with Spanish smartphone maker Geeksphone, the phone’s hardware manufacturer, were not disclosed. Silent Circle said Thursday that it has raised $50 million and plans on showing off an encrypted “enterprise privacy ecosystem” at World Mobile Congress next week. A BlackPhone tablet is on the way, too.
“Silent Circle has brought tremendous disruption to the mobile industry and created an integrated suite of secure enterprise communication products that are challenging the status quo,” Mike Janke, cofounder and chairman of the Silent Circle board, said in a statement. “This first stage of growth has enabled us to raise approximately $50M to accelerate our continued rapid expansion and fuel our second stage of growth.”
Tech Firm Developed Spyware For Foreign Governments
Posted by Brian in News, Threat Watch on 25/Aug/2014 12:40
From The Washington Post:
Merely by playing a YouTube video or visiting a Microsoft Live service page, for instance, an unknown number of computers around the world have been implanted with Trojan horses by government security services that siphon their communications and files. Google, which owns YouTube, and Microsoft are racing to close the vulnerability.
A Prize Is Needed For Easy Encryption
Posted by Brian in Comms, Threat Watch on 30/Apr/2014 12:16
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
In an era when email and messaging services are being regularly subject to attacks, surveillance, and compelled disclosure of user data, we know that many people around the world need secure end-to-end encrypted communications tools so that service providers and governments cannot read their messages. Unfortunately, the software that has traditionally been used for these purposes, such as PGP and OTR, suffers from numerous usability problems that make it impractical for many of the journalists, activists and others around the world whose lives and liberty depend on their ability to communicate confidentially. Read the rest of this entry »
EFF Calls On Companies To Enhance Security
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
How to Protect Your Users from NSA Backdoors: An Open Letter to Technology Companies
As security researchers, technologists, and digital rights advocates, we are deeply concerned about collaboration between government agencies and technology companies in undermining users’ security. Among other examples, we are alarmed by recent allegations that RSA, Inc. accepted $10 million from NSA to keep a compromised algorithm in the default setting of a security product long after its faults were revealed. We believe that covert collusion with spy agencies poses a grave threat to users and must be mitigated with commitment to the following best practices to protect users from illegal surveillance: Read the rest of this entry »
Blackphone Challenging Conventional Wisdom
Posted by Brian in News, Threat Watch on 14/Feb/2014 16:26
From the Silent Circle blog:
Blackphone is an innovative new ecosystem. The idea of creating an entirely new ecosystem is not new. Microsoft had its run with Windows, Skype, and Bing. They created an entire ecosystem behind the hardware and software, but failed to innovate ahead of the curve. Blackberry had its run with the phones, BEZ servers and BBM messaging. They are now dying a thousand little deaths because they did not innovate quickly enough. Google, Apple, Samsung and others have created dominant ecosystems that tie in software, hardware, wearables, media, music and services.  They rapidly innovated new platforms and models that left Microsoft, Blackberry, Nokia, HTC and others behind quickly. It’s been an amazing run for them, but this model too is dwindling. Fast movers like Xiaomi are killing them. Innovation, security and privacy demands are already putting cracks in this windshield. The fuel that feeds their ecosystem machine is customer data… Your data. It is pure gold to them.
BitTorrent Creates More Secure Chat Program
From BitTorrent:
First, a few words on Chat’s origins. Here at BitTorrent, we value privacy. With the news this year reminding us all of the susceptibility of the communications platforms we rely on to snooping, we found ourselves wanting something new, something secure, something private. We ultimately realized that we were uniquely qualified to build this platform.
RSA Product Weakened by NSA
Posted by Brian in News, Threat Watch on 25/Sep/2013 12:58
From The Guardian:
RSA, the security arm of the storage company EMC, sent an email to customers telling them that the default random number generator in a toolkit for developers used a weak formula, and they should switch to one of the other formulas in the product.
Keeping The NSA Out of Your Life
The Washington Post has a list of some things you can do to increase your security and make it harder for the government to keep tabs on you.
If recentreports are to be believed, the National Security Agency has broad powers to capture private information about Americans. They know who we’re calling, they have access to our Gmail messages and AOL Instant Messenger chats, and it’s a safe bet that they have other interception capabilities that haven’t been publicly disclosed. Indeed, most mainstream communications technologies are vulnerable to government eavesdropping.
Here is an explanation of TOR, software that allows anonymous browsing on the internet:
Whole Disk Encryption At Risk
Posted by Brian in News, Threat Watch on 22/Jan/2013 08:15
Joe Biden Accidentally Helped Us All E-Mail in Private
Posted by Gary in Comms, Law, Threat Watch on 17/Dec/2012 15:28
From: Danger Room
In the late ’80s and early ’90s, Phil Zimmermann was a Colorado peacenik with a half-written program that he swore would one day let people exchange messages without Big Brother peering inside. The problem was, with a freelance job and two kids, Zimmermann could never quite find the time to finish the damn code — until Joe Biden came along.
The iPhone Has Passed a Key Security Threshold
From: Technology Review
At the heart of Apple’s security architecture is the Advanced Encryption Standard algorithm (AES), a data-scrambling system published in 1998 and adopted as a U.S. government standard in 2001. After more than a decade of exhaustive analysis, AES is widely regarded as unbreakable. The algorithm is so strong that no computer imaginable for the foreseeable future—even a quantum computer—would be able to crack a truly random 256-bit AES key. The National Security Agency has approved AES-256 for storing top-secret data.