Essays in the Category "Computer and Information Security"
Page 32 of 33
The Challenge of Cryptography
Never underestimate the time and effort attackers will expend to thwart your security systems.These days, security is on the minds of anyone involved in building or using information systems. After all, every form of commerce has had its share of fraud, from farmers rigging their weight scales to counterfeiters passing off phony currency. Electronic commerce is no exception, with fraud taking the form of forgery, misrepresentation, and denial of service. And it doesn’t stop with electronic transactions. There are privacy breaches, with competitors intercepting communications, and electronic vandalism, with attackers destroying Web pages and mail-bombing ISPs. It seems threats are coming from everywhere…
Cryptography, Security and the Future
From e-mail to cellular communications, from secure Web access to digital cash, cryptography is an essential part of today’s information systems. Cryptography helps provide accountability, fairness, accuracy, and confidentiality. It can prevent fraud in electronic commerce and assure the validity of financial transactions. It can protect your anonymity or prove your identity. It can keep vandals from altering your Web page and prevent industrial competitors from reading your confidential documents. And in the future, as commerce and communications continue to move to computer networks, cryptography will become more and more vital…
Why Cryptography Is Harder Than It Looks
From e-mail to cellular communications, from secure Web access to digital cash, cryptography is an essential part of today’s information systems. Cryptography helps provide accountability, fairness, accuracy, and confidentiality. It can prevent fraud in electronic commerce and assure the validity of financial transactions. It can prove your identity or protect your anonymity. It can keep vandals from altering your Web page and prevent industrial competitors from reading your confidential documents. And in the future, as commerce and communications continue to move to computer networks, cryptography will become more and more vital…
Protect Your E-Mail
Safeguard your messages today, and prepare for electronic commerce tomorrow
You may have just started using the Internet for your business, but scientists, academics, and computer programmers have been using it for years. It was designed specifically as a public network for sharing information. Because the availability of information was the priority, provisions for data security were not considered essential. But now that you’re sending proprietary business information over the Internet that openness can become a drawback. You need to take steps to protect your communications…
Electronic Speech – For Domestic Use Only
The U.S. State Department recently ruled that some forms of electronic speech are not protected by the First Amendment and can be prohibited from export. This decision raises questions about freedom of speech on the information superhighway. As business communications continue to migrate from paper mail to electronic mail, these questions will become more important. It is vital that laws address this new form of speech.
Last year, I wrote a book called Applied Cryptography> (John Wiley & Sons, 1994), which explains cryptography in nonmathematical language. It describes how to build cryptography into products, illustrates cryptographic techniques, and evaluates algorithms and makes recommendations on their quality. It even includes source-code listings that enable readers to implement many of the algorithms and techniques described…
High-Tech Government Snooping: Anti-Crime or Orwell Revisited?
Good news! The federal government respects and is working to protect your privacy… just as long as you don’t want privacy from the government itself.
In April 1994, the Clinton administration, cleaning up old business from the Bush administration, introduced a new cryptography initiative that ensures the government’s ability to conduct electronic surveillance. The first fruit of this initiative is CLIPPER, designed to secure telephone communications.
CLIPPER is a tamper-resistant chip designed by the National Security Agency, a super-secret branch of the Department of Defense…
Virus Killers: Macworld Lab Tests Virus Software and Survives
Macintosh users ignore computer viruses at their peril. Viruses can cause irreparable damage to the system or destroy megabytes of data. Fortunately, unlike their biological namesakes, computer viruses are relatively easy and painless to control. With a leading virus-protection software program, it takes only a few minutes a day to remain virus-free.
Macworld Lab tested four antiviral products—the freeware application Disinfectant, Central Point Software’s MacTools ($149.95), Symantec’s Symantec AntiVirus for Macintosh (SAM, $99), and Virex ($99.95) from Datawatch—against every Macintosh virus known at the time of testing, 52 in all. We also looked at each product’s features and measured how fast the programs detected viruses…
Virus Protection on the Mac is Simple But Necessary
“Protecting yourself from Mac virus infection is easy; it’s a wonder there are people who don’t do it,” said Ben Liberman, independent Macintosh consultant in Chicago. There are several good anti-viral software packages, both commercial and free, designed to protect your Mac from attack.
There are two types of anti-viral software: protective and detective. The commercial virus-prevention software packages -Central Point Software Inc.’s Central Point Anti-Virus for Macintosh 2.0, Symantec Corp.’s Symantec Anti-Virus for Macintosh 3.5 and Datawatch Corp.’s Virex 4.1 – support both protective and detective protection. There are two freeware virus-protection programs: Disinfectant, which takes a detective approach, and GateKeeper, which takes a protective approach. Both programs are available on most bulletin board systems and on-line services…
Clipper Gives Big Brother Far Too Much Power
In April, the Clinton administration, cleaning up business left over from the Bush administration, introduced a cryptography initiative that gives government the ability to conduct electronic surveillance. The first fruit of this initiative is Clipper, a National Security Agency (NSA)-designed, tamper-resistant VLSI chip. The stated purpose of this chip is to secure telecommunications.
Clipper uses a classified encryption algorithm. Each Clipper chip has a special key, not needed for messages, that is used only to encrypt a copy of each user’s message key. Anyone who knows the key can decrypt wiretapped communications protected with this chip. The claim is that only the government will know this key and will use it only when authorized to do so by a court…
Data Guardians
Security problems have become almost as commonplace as desktop computers. A disgruntled city employee, trying to get back at the boss, digs into the mayor’s personal files and sends damaging information to the press. A woman asks her computer-expert husband to recover an accidentally deleted budget file; he recovers not only that file, but purposely deleted letters to an illicit lover. Or a major corporation loses critical financial data to an industrial spy who dialed in to a company file server.
Most of us have some computer-security vulnerability. Fortunately, software solutions can address mild concern through outright paranoia. Some security products will keep your kid brother from reading your files. Others will prevent a Mac guru from reading your files. Still others will bar the best Macintosh programmers in the industry from reading your files. Finally, some software will probably keep the spy agencies of large nations or the industrial spies of multinational corporations from reading our files…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.