hardware
DefCon 19, Day 3
Sunday was interesting — this was actually the first DefCon I have attended (and I’ve been to the last five) where Sunday was actually busy. Normally Sunday feels very empty — most people have gone home, and the ones that are still around are too hung over to go to the morning sessions. I was [...]
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 [...]
BlackHat 2008, Day 1
Today was the first day of this year’s BlackHat Briefings in Las Vegas. The biggest security conference of the year, it’s always an interesting place to be and often involves the release of new and previously unknown exploits. The keynote speaker was Ian Angell, of the London School of Economics, who was speaking, ostensibly, about [...]
Two-Factor Auth for World of Warcraft
Blizzard Entertainment, makers of the phenomenally-successful multiplayer game World of Warcraft, have introduced two-factor authentication for logging into the game. For $6.50, they’ll sell you a dynamic password keychain token called the Blizzard Authenticator, which looks much like the RSA keyfobs many in the IT industry use to log into their corporate VPNs. It may [...]
Surveillance and Ubiquity
HexView has an article about tracking vehicles with RFID tire pressure monitors. The devices are found in tires and transmit tire pressure to the engine control module, which sounds innocuous enough, but to prevent modules from reading neighboring cars’ tires by accident, they also transmit a unique ID. Thus, you can follow a car around [...]
