Entries Tagged "encryption"

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New al Qaeda Encryption Tool

There’s not a lot of information—and quite a lot of hyperbole—in this article:

With the release of the Asrar Al Dardashah plugin, GIMF promised “secure correspondence” based on the Pidgin chat client, which supports multiple chat platforms, including Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, Google Talk and Jabber/XMPP.

“The Asrar Al Dardashah plugin supports most of the languages in the world through the use of Unicode encoding, including Arabic, English, Urdu, Pashto, Bengali and Indonesian,” stated the announcement, which was posted on several top online Jihadist forums and GIMF’s official website.

“The plugin is easy and quick to use, and, like its counterpart, the Asrar Al Mujahideen program, it uses the technical algorithm RSA for asymmetric encryption, which is based [on] a pair of interrelated keys: a public key allocated for encrypting and a private key used for decrypting,” GIMF’s statement said. “To use the plugin, both of the communicating parties should install and activate the plugin and produce and import the Asrar Al Mujahideen private key into the Asrar Al Dardashah plugin, which automatically produces the corresponding public key of 2048-bit-length for use. It offers a level of encryption which has not been cracked or broken and can be relied upon entirely to protect the confidentiality of sensitive communication[s].”

Posted on February 13, 2013 at 6:13 AM • View Comments

Breaking Hard-Disk Encryption

The newly announced ElcomSoft Forensic Disk Decryptor can decrypt BitLocker, PGP, and TrueCrypt. And it’s only $300. How does it work?

Elcomsoft Forensic Disk Decryptor acquires the necessary decryption keys by analyzing memory dumps and/or hibernation files obtained from the target PC. You’ll thus need to get a memory dump from a running PC (locked or unlocked) with encrypted volumes mounted, via a standard forensic product or via a FireWire attack. Alternatively, decryption keys can also be derived from hibernation files if a target PC is turned off.

This isn’t new. I wrote about AccessData doing the same thing in 2007:

Even so, none of this might actually matter. AccessData sells another program, Forensic Toolkit, that, among other things, scans a hard drive for every printable character string. It looks in documents, in the Registry, in e-mail, in swap files, in deleted space on the hard drive … everywhere. And it creates a dictionary from that, and feeds it into PRTK.

And PRTK breaks more than 50 percent of passwords from this dictionary alone.

It’s getting harder and harder to maintain good file security.

Posted on December 27, 2012 at 1:02 PM • View Comments

China Now Blocking Encryption

The “Great Firewall of China” is now able to detect and block encryption:

A number of companies providing “virtual private network” (VPN) services to users in China say the new system is able to “learn, discover and block” the encrypted communications methods used by a number of different VPN systems.

China Unicom, one of the biggest telecoms providers in the country, is now killing connections where a VPN is detected, according to one company with a number of users in China.

EDITED TO ADD (1/14): Some interesting blog comments from an American living and working in China.

Posted on December 20, 2012 at 6:32 AM • View Comments

Roger Williams' Cipher Cracked

Another historical cipher, this one from the 1600s, has been cracked:

Senior math major Lucas Mason-Brown, who has done the majority of the decoding, said his first instinct was to develop a statistical tool. The 21-year-old from Belmont, Mass., used frequency analysis, which looks at the frequency of letters or groups of letters in a text, but initially didn’t get far.

He picked up critical clues after learning Williams had been trained in shorthand as a court stenographer in London, and built his own proprietary shorthand off an existing system. Mason-Brown refined his analysis and came up with a rough key.

Williams’ system consisted of 28 symbols that stand for a combination of English letters or sounds. How they’re arranged is key to their meaning; arrange them one way and you get one word, arrange them another, you get something different. One major complication, according to Mason-Brown: Williams often improvised.

Posted on December 5, 2012 at 6:01 AM • View Comments

Stealing VM Keys from the Hardware Cache

Research into one VM stealing crypto keys from another VM running on the same hardware.

ABSTRACT: This paper details the construction of an access-driven side-channel attack by which a malicious virtual machine (VM) extracts fine-grained information from a victim VM running on the same physical computer. This attack is the first such attack demonstrated on a symmetric multiprocessing system virtualized using a modern VMM (Xen). Such systems are very common today, ranging from desktops that use virtualization to sandbox application or OS compromises, to clouds that co-locate the workloads of mutually distrustful customers. Constructing such a side-channel requires overcoming challenges including core migration, numerous sources of channel noise, and the difficulty of preempting the victim with sufficient frequency to extract fine-grained information from it. This paper addresses these challenges and demonstrates the attack in a lab setting by extracting an ElGamal decryption key from a victim using the most recent version of the libgcrypt cryptographic library.

Two articles.

Posted on November 16, 2012 at 6:13 AM • View Comments

Encryption in Cloud Computing

This article makes the important argument that encryption—where the user and not the cloud provider holds the keys—is critical to protect cloud data. The problem is, it upsets cloud providers’ business models:

In part it is because encryption with customer controlled keys is inconsistent with portions of their business model. This architecture limits a cloud provider’s ability to data mine or otherwise exploit the users’ data. If a provider does not have access to the keys, they lose access to the data for their own use. While a cloud provider may agree to keep the data confidential (i.e., they won’t show it to anyone else) that promise does not prevent their own use of the data to improve search results or deliver ads. Of course, this kind of access to the data has huge value to some cloud providers and they believe that data access in exchange for providing below-cost cloud services is a fair trade.

Also, providing onsite encryption at rest options might require some providers to significantly modify their existing software systems, which could require a substantial capital investment.

That second reason is actually very important, too. A lot of cloud providers don’t just store client data, they do things with that data. If the user encrypts the data, it’s an opaque blob to the cloud provider—and a lot of cloud services would be impossible.

Lots of companies are trying really hard to solve parts of this problem, but a truly optimal solution still eludes us.

Posted on November 12, 2012 at 5:47 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.