Entries Tagged "Schneier news"

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Worldwide Encryption Products Survey

Today I released my worldwide survey of encryption products.

The findings of this survey identified 619 entities that sell encryption products. Of those 412, or two-thirds, are outside the U.S.-calling into question the efficacy of any US mandates forcing backdoors for law-enforcement access. It also showed that anyone who wants to avoid US surveillance has over 567 competing products to choose from. These foreign products offer a wide variety of secure applications­—voice encryption, text message encryption, file encryption, network-traffic encryption, anonymous currency­—providing the same levels of security as US products do today.

Details:

  • There are at least 865 hardware or software products incorporating encryption from 55 different countries. This includes 546 encryption products from outside the US, representing two-thirds of the total.
  • The most common non-US country for encryption products is Germany, with 112 products. This is followed by the United Kingdom, Canada, France, and Sweden, in that order.
  • The five most common countries for encryption products­—including the US­—account for two-thirds of the total. But smaller countries like Algeria, Argentina, Belize, the British Virgin Islands, Chile, Cyprus, Estonia, Iraq, Malaysia, St. Kitts and Nevis, Tanzania, and Thailand each produce at least one encryption product.
  • Of the 546 foreign encryption products we found, 56% are available for sale and 44% are free. 66% are proprietary, and 34% are open source. Some for-sale products also have a free version.
  • At least 587 entities­—primarily companies—­either sell or give away encryption products. Of those, 374, or about two-thirds, are outside the US.
  • Of the 546 foreign encryption products, 47 are file encryption products, 68 e-mail encryption products, 104 message encryption products, 35 voice encryption products, and 61 virtual private networking products.

The report is here, here, and here. The data, in Excel form, is here.

Press articles are starting to come in. (Here are the previous blog posts on the effort.)

I know the database is incomplete, and I know there are errors. I welcome both additions and corrections, and will be releasing a 1.1 version of this survey in a few weeks.

EDITED TO ADD (2/13): More news.

Posted on February 11, 2016 at 11:05 AM • View Comments

Data and Goliath Published in Paperback

Today, Data and Goliath is being published in paperback.

Everyone tells me that the paperback version sells better than the hardcover, even though it’s a year later. I can’t really imagine that there are tens of thousands of people who wouldn’t spend $28 on a hardcover but are happy to spend $18 on the paperback, but we’ll see. (Amazon has the hardcover for $19, the paperback for $11.70, and the Kindle edition for $14.60, plus shipping, if any. I am still selling signed hardcovers for $28 including domestic shipping—more for international.)

I got a box of paperbacks from my publisher last week. They look good. Not as good as the hardcover, but good for a trade paperback.

Posted on February 8, 2016 at 2:11 PM • View Comments

Worldwide Cryptographic Products Survey: Edits and Additions Wanted

Back in September, I announced my intention to survey the world market of cryptographic products. The goal is to compile a list of both free and commercial encryption products that can be used to protect arbitrary data and messages. That is, I’m not interested in products that are specifically designed for a narrow application, like financial transactions, or products that provide authentication or data integrity. I am interested in products that people like FBI director James Comey can possibly claim help criminals communicate securely.

Together with a student here at Harvard University, we’ve compiled a spreadsheet of over 400 products from many different countries.

At this point, we would like your help. Please look at the list. Please correct anything that is wrong, and add anything that is missing. Use this form to submit changes and additions. If it’s more complicated than that, please e-mail me.

As the rhetoric surrounding weakening or banning strong encryption continues, it’s important for policymakers to understand how international the cryptographic market is, and how much of it is not under their control. My hope is that this survey will contribute to the debate by making that point.

Posted on December 3, 2015 at 7:55 AM • View Comments

Help with Mailing List Hosting

I could use some help with finding a host for my monthly newsletter, Crypto-Gram. My old setup just wasn’t reliable enough. I had a move planned, but that fell through when the new host’s bounce processing system turned out to be buggy and they admitted the problem might never be fixed.

Clearly I need something a lot more serious. My criteria include subscriber privacy, reasonable cost, and a proven track record of reliability with large mailing lists. (I would use MailChimp, but it has mandatory click tracking for new accounts.)

One complication is that SpamCop, a popular anti-spam service, tells me I have at least one of their “spamtrap” addresses on the list. Spamtraps are addresses that—in theory—have never been used, so they shouldn’t be on any legitimate list. I don’t know how they got on my list, since I make people confirm their subscriptions by replying to an e-mail or clicking on an e-mailed link. But I used to make rare exceptions for people who just asked to join, so maybe a bad address or two got on that way. Spamtraps don’t work if you tell people what they are, so I can’t just find and remove them. And this has caused no end of problems for subscribers who use SpamCop’s blacklist.

At a minimum, I need to be sure that a new host won’t kick me out for couple of spamtraps. And if the solution to this problem involves making all 100,000 people on the list reconfirm their subscriptions, then that has to be as simple and user-friendly a process as possible.

If you can recommend a host that would work, I’m interested. Even better would be talking to an expert with lots of experience running large mailing lists who can guide me. If you know a person like that, or if you are one, please leave a comment or e-mail me at the address on my Contact page.

Posted on August 3, 2015 at 5:58 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.