Bug in Google's Censorship
Seems that the censorship service that Google has set up at China’s request suffers from a trivial bug: if you type your searches using capital letters, you bypass the censor.
This’ll be fixed real soon, I’m sure.
Entries Tagged "China"
Page 17 of 17
Titan Rain
There seems to be a well-organized Chinese military hacking effort against the U.S. military. The U.S. code name for the effort is “Titan Rain.” The news reports are spotty, and more than a little sensationalist, but I know people involved in this investigation—the attackers are very well-organized.
U.S. Government Computers Attacked from China
From the Washington Post:
Web sites in China are being used heavily to target computer networks in the Defense Department and other U.S. agencies, successfully breaching hundreds of unclassified networks, according to several U.S. officials.
Classified systems have not been compromised, the officials added. But U.S. authorities remain concerned because, as one official said, even seemingly innocuous information, when pulled together from various sources, can yield useful intelligence to an adversary….
“The scope of this thing is surprisingly big,” said one of four government officials who spoke separately about the incidents, which stretch back as far as two or three years and have been code-named Titan Rain by U.S. investigators. All officials insisted on anonymity, given the sensitivity of the matter.
Whether the attacks constitute a coordinated Chinese government campaign to penetrate U.S. networks and spy on government databanks has divided U.S. analysts. Some in the Pentagon are said to be convinced of official Chinese involvement; others see the electronic probing as the work of other hackers simply using Chinese networks to disguise the origins of the attacks.
Chinese Cryptographers Denied U.S. Visas
Chinese cryptographer Xiaoyun Wang, the woman who broke SHA-1 last year, was unable to attend the Crypto conference to present her paper on Monday. The U.S. government didn’t give her a visa in time:
On Monday, she was scheduled to explain her discovery in a keynote address to an international group of researchers meeting in California.
But a stand-in had to take her place, because she was not able to enter the country. Indeed, only one of nine Chinese researchers who sought to enter the country for the conference received a visa in time to attend.
Sadly, this is now common:
Although none of the scientists were officially denied visas by the United States Consulate, officials at the State Department and National Academy of Sciences said this week that the situation was not uncommon.
Lengthy delays in issuing visas are now routine, they said, particularly for those involved in sensitive scientific and technical fields.
These delays can make it impossible for some foreign researchers to attend U.S. conferences. There are researchers who need to have their paper accepted before they can apply for a visa. But the paper review and selection process, done by the program committee in the months before the conference, doesn’t finish early enough. Conferences can move the submission and selection deadlines earlier, but that just makes the conference less current.
In Wang’s case, she applied for her visa in early July. So did her student. Dingyi Pei, another Chinese researcher who is organizing Asiacrypt this year, applied for his in early June. (I don’t know about the others.) Wang has not received her visa, and Pei got his just yesterday.
This kind of thing hurts cryptography, and hurts national security. The visa restrictions were designed to protect American advanced technologies from foreigners, but in this case they’re having the opposite effect. We are all more secure because there is a vibrant cryptography research community in the U.S. and the world. By prohibiting Chinese cryptographers from attending U.S. conferences, we’re only hurting ourselves.
NIST is sponsoring a workshop on hash functions (sadly, it’s being referred to as a “hash bash”) in October. I hope Wang gets a visa for that.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.