crypto
BlackHat USA 2011, Day 2
The second day of BlackHat started out with a keynote by Mudge. I attended this one despite the normally-dull nature of BlackHat keynotes, because while Mudge is a Fed now (he works for DARPA), he has a long history as a contributor to hacker culture and I wanted to hear what he had to say. [...]
BlackHat USA 2011, Day 1
I spent last week in Las Vegas, for BlackHat USA 2011 and DefCon 19 — my annual security conference pilgrimage. Overall impression: the quality of the actual presentations was below-average this year, but it was still an educational experience, a good professional networking event, and probably the most fun I’ve had at DefCon so far. [...]
Decrypting bin Laden’s Hard Drives
With the news that the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound resulted in the capture of at least 10 hard drives and over 100 miscellaneous data storage devices (CDs, DVDs, flash drives, floppy disks, etc.), a common question that’s come up on news sites is “So, how likely are we to be able to decrypt these things? How good is the best non-government-grade encryption, anyway?”
BlackHat 2010: Day 1
I’ve just returned from a trip to BlackHat Briefings USA 2010 and DefCon 18. As always, it was an enjoyable week in Las Vegas learning about the latest research, networking with the surprisingly small world of security professionals, and generally having fun hanging out with a lot of interesting people with the hacker mindset. BlackHat [...]
BlackHat 2009, Day 2
The Thursday keynote was given by Bob Lentz, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the United States. His main point was the paradigm shift from network-centric security to what he called content-centric security, and the fact that this devalues the protections around network perimeters. Static defenses don’t work when all the services being used [...]
