Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) In the US government’s ongoing campaign to protect data in the age of quantum computers, a new and powerful attack that used a single traditional computer to completely break a fourth-round candidate highlights the risks involved in standardizing the next generation of encryption algorithms. Last month, the US Department of Commerce’s… Read More »
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) A number of course-altering US Supreme Court decisions last month—including the reversal of a constitutional right to abortion and the overturning of a century-old limit on certain firearms permits—have activists and average Americans around the country anticipating the fallout for rights and privacy as abortion “trigger laws,” expanded access to concealed… Read More »
Enlarge / Conceptual computer artwork of electronic circuitry with blue and red light passing through it, representing how data may be controlled and stored in a quantum computer. (credit: Getty Images) In the not-too-distant future—as little as a decade, perhaps, nobody knows exactly how long—the cryptography protecting your bank transactions, chat messages, and medical records… Read More »
Enlarge In the decade since larger-than-life character Kim Dotcom founded Mega, the cloud storage service has amassed 250 million registered users and stores a whopping 120 billion files that take up more than 1,000 petabytes of storage. A key selling point that has helped fuel the growth is an extraordinary promise that no top-tier Mega… Read More »
reader comments 47 with 29 posters participating, including story author Share this story Cryptographic keys generated with older software now owned by technology company Rambus are weak enough to be broken instantly using commodity hardware, a researcher reported on Monday. This revelation is part of an investigation that also uncovered a handful of weak keys… Read More »
Enlarge / The seal of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is seen at the J. Edgar Hoover building in Washington, D.C. reader comments 20 with 16 posters participating Share this story For three weeks during the REvil ransomeware attack this summer, the FBI secretly withheld the key that would have decrypted data and computers… Read More »
Enlarge / An anti-government graffiti that reads in Farsi “Death to the dictator” is sprayed at a wall north of Tehran on September 30, 2009. Getty Images reader comments 49 with 38 posters participating Share this story Amid ever-increasing government Internet control, surveillance, and censorship in Iran, a new Android app aims to give Iranians… Read More »
Enlarge / The security of Facebook’s popular messaging app leaves several rather important devils in its details. reader comments 88 with 64 posters participating, including story author Share this story Yesterday, independent newsroom ProPublica published a detailed piece examining the popular WhatsApp messaging platform’s privacy claims. The service famously offers “end-to-end encryption,” which most users interpret… Read More »
reader comments 62 with 41 posters participating Share this story Privacy tools-seller Windscribe said it failed to encrypt company VPN servers that were recently confiscated by authorities in Ukraine, a lapse that made it possible for the authorities to impersonate Windscribe servers and capture and decrypt traffic passing through them. The Ontario, Canada-based company said… Read More »
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) OpenSSL, the most widely used software library for implementing website and email encryption, has patched a high-severity vulnerability that makes it easy for hackers to completely shut down huge numbers of servers. OpenSSL provides time-tested cryptographic functions that implement the Transport Layer Security protocol, the successor to Secure Sockets Layer that… Read More »