Entries Tagged "encryption"

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Blu-ray Cracked

The Blu-ray DRM system has been broken, although details are scant. It’s the same person who broke the HD DVD system last month. (Both use AACS.)

As I’ve written previously, both of these systems are supposed to be designed in such a way as to recover from hacks like this. We’re going to find out if the recovery feature works.

Blu-ray and HD DVD both allow for decryption keys to be updated in reaction to attacks, for example by making it impossible to play high-definition movies via playback software known to be weak or flawed. So muslix64 work has effectively sparked off a cat-and-mouse game between hackers and the entertainment industry, where consumers are likely to face compatibility problems while footing the bill for the entertainment industry’s insistence on pushing ultimately flawed DRM technology on an unwilling public.

EDITED TO ADD (1/29): You should read this seven part series on the topic.

Posted on January 26, 2007 at 12:47 PM • View Comments

U.S. Government to Encrypt All Laptops

This is a good idea:

To address the issue of data leaks of the kind we’ve seen so often in the last year because of stolen or missing laptops, writes Saqib Ali, the Feds are planning to use Full Disk Encryption (FDE) on all Government-owned computers.

“On June 23, 2006 a Presidential Mandate was put in place requiring all agency laptops to fully encrypt data on the HDD. The U.S. Government is currently conducting the largest single side-by-side comparison and competition for the selection of a Full Disk Encryption product. The selected product will be deployed on Millions of computers in the U.S. federal government space. This implementation will end up being the largest single implementation ever, and all of the information regarding the competition is in the public domain. The evaluation will come to an end in 90 days. You can view all the vendors competing and list of requirements.”

Certainly, encrypting everything is overkill, but it’s much easier than figuring out what to encrypt and what not to. And I really like that there is a open competition to choose which encryption program to use. It’s certainly a high-stakes competition among the vendors, but one that is likely to improve the security of all products. I’ve long said that one of the best things the government can do to improve computer security is to use its vast purchasing power to pressure vendors to improve their security. I would expect the winner to make a lot of sales outside of the contract, and for the losers to correct their deficiencies so they’ll do better next time.

Side note: Key escrow is a requirement, something that makes sense in a government or corporate application:

Capable of secure escrow and recovery of the symetric [sic] encryption key

I wonder if the NSA is involved in the evaluation at all, and if its analysis will be made public.

Posted on January 3, 2007 at 2:00 PM • View Comments

More on the Unabomber's Code

Last month I posted about Ted Kaczynski’s pencil-and-paper cryptography. It seems that he invented his own cipher, which the police couldn’t crack until they found a description of the code amongst his personal papers.

The link I found was from KPIX, a CBS affiliate in the San Francisco area. Some time after writing it, I was contacted by the station and asked to comment on some other pieces of the Unabomber’s cryptography for a future story (video online).

There were five new pages of Unabomber evidence that I talked about (1, 2, 3, 4, and 5). All five pages were presented to me as being pages written by the Unabomber, but it seems pretty obvious to me that pages 4 and 5, rather than being Kaczynski’s own key, are notes written by a cryptanalyst trying to break the Unabomber’s code.

In any case, it’s all fascinating.

Posted on January 3, 2007 at 6:59 AM • View Comments

The Unabomber's Code

This is interesting. Ted Kaczynski wrote in code:

In a small journal written in code, he documented his thoughts about the crimes he was committing. That code was so difficult, a source says the CIA couldn’t crack it—until someone found the key itself among other documents, and then translated it.

Look at the photo. It was a manual, pencil-and-paper cipher. Does anyone know the details of the algorithm?

Posted on December 6, 2006 at 12:53 PM • View Comments

Attacking Bank-Card PINs

Research paper by Omer Berkman and Odelia Moshe Ostrovsky: “The Unbearable Lightness of PIN Cracking“:

Abstract. We describe new attacks on the financial PIN processing API. The attacks apply to switches as well as to verification facilities. The attacks are extremely severe allowing an attacker to expose customer PINs by executing only one or two API calls per exposed PIN. One of the attacks uses only the translate function which is a required function in every switch. The other attacks abuse functions that are used to allow customers to select their PINs online. Some of the attacks can be applied on a switch even though the attacked functions require issuer’s keys which do not exist on a switch. This is particularly disturbing as it was widely believed that functions requiring issuer’s keys cannot do any harm if the respective keys are unavailable.

Basically, the paper describes an inherent flaw with the way ATM PINs are encrypted and transmitted on the international financial networks, making them vulnerable to attack from malicious insiders in a bank.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the attack is that you’re only as secure as the most untrusted bank on the network. Instead of just having to trust your own issuer bank that they have good security against insider fraud, you have to trust every other financial institution on the network as well. An insider at another bank can crack your ATM PIN if you withdraw money from any of the other bank’s ATMs.

The authors tell me that they’ve contacted the major credit card companies and banks with this information, and haven’t received much of a response. They believe it is now time to alert the public.

Posted on November 17, 2006 at 7:31 AM • View Comments

Skimming RFID Credit Cards

It’s easy to skim personal information off an RFID credit card.

From The New York Times:

They could skim and store the information from a card with a device the size of a couple of paperback books, which they cobbled together from readily available computer and radio components for $150. They say they could probably make another one even smaller and cheaper: about the size of a pack of gum for less than $50. And because the cards can be read even through a wallet or an item of clothing, the security of the information, the researchers say, is startlingly weak. ‘Would you be comfortable wearing your name, your credit card number and your card expiration date on your T-shirt?’ Mr. Heydt-Benjamin, a graduate student, asked.

And from The Register:

The attack uses off-the-shelf radio and card reader equipment that could cost as little as $150. Although the attack fails to yield verification codes normally needed to make online purchases, it would still be potentially possible for crooks to use the data to order goods and services from online stores that don’t request this information.

Despite assurances by the issuing companies that data contained on RFID-based credit cards would be encrypted, the researchers found that the majority of cards they tested did not use encryption or other data protection technology.

And from the RFID Journal:

I don’t think the exposing of potential vulnerabilities of these cards is a huge black eye for the credit-card industry or for the RFID industry. Millions of people won’t suddenly have their credit-card numbers exposed to thieves the way they do when someone hacks a bank’s database or an employee loses a laptop with the card numbers on it. But it is likely that these vulnerabilities will need to be addressed as the technology becomes more mature and criminals start figuring out ways to abuse it.

Posted on November 7, 2006 at 12:49 PM • View Comments

Seagate Encrypted Drive

Seagate has announced a product called DriveTrust, which provides hardware-based encryption on the drive itself. The technology is proprietary, but they use standard algorithms: AES and triple-DES, RSA, and SHA-1. Details on the key management are sketchy, but the system requires a pre-boot password and/or combination of biometrics to access the disk. And Seagate is working on some sort of enterprise-wide key management system to make it easier to deploy the technology company-wide.

The first target market is laptop computers. No computer manufacturer has announced support for DriveTrust yet.

More details in these articles.

Posted on November 7, 2006 at 7:04 AM • View Comments

The Doghouse: SecureRF

SecureRF:

Claims to offer the first feasible security for RFIDs. Conventional public key cryptography (such as RSA) is far too computationally intensive for an RFID. SecureRF provides a similar technology at far lower footprint by harnessing a relatively obscure area of mathematics: infinite group theory, which comes (of all places) from knot theory, a branch of topology.

Their website claims to have “white papers” on the theory, but you have to give them your personal information to get it. Of course, they reference no actual published cryptography papers. “New mathematics” is my Snake-Oil Warning Sign #2—and I strongly suspect their documentation displays several other of the warning signs, too. I’d stay away from this one.

Posted on October 9, 2006 at 7:47 AM • View Comments

FairUse4WM News

A couple of weeks I ago I wrote about the battle between Microsoft’s DRM system and FairUse4WM, which breaks it. The news for this week is that Microsoft has patched their security against FairUseWM 1.2 and filed a lawsuit against the program’s anonymous authors, and those same anonymous authors have released FairUse4WM 1.3, which breaks the latest Microsoft patch.

We asked Viodentia about Redmond’s accusation that he and/or his associates broke into its systems in order to obtain the IP necessary to crack PlaysForSure; Vio replied that he’s “utterly shocked” by the charge. “I didn’t use any Microsoft source code. However, I believe that this lawsuit is a fishing expedition to get identity information, which can then be used to either bring more targeted lawsuits, or to cause other trouble.” We’re sure Microsoft would like its partners and the public to think that its DRM is generally infallible and could only be cracked by stealing its IP, so Viodentia’s conclusion about its legal tactics seems pretty fair, obvious, and logical to us.

What’s interesting about this continuing saga is how different it is from the normal find-vulnerability-then-patch sequence. The authors of FairUse4WM aren’t finding bugs and figuring out how to exploit them, forcing Microsoft to patch them. This is a sequence of crack, fix, re-crack, re-fix, etc.

The reason we’re seeing this—and this is going to be the norm for DRM systems—is that DRM is fundamentally an impossible problem. Making it work at all involves tricks, and breaking DRM is akin to “fixing” the software so the tricks don’t work. Anyone looking for a demonstation that technical DRM is doomed should watch this story unfold. (If Microsoft has any chance of winning at all, it’s via the legal route.)

Posted on September 28, 2006 at 12:55 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.