hardware
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 [...]
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 seem [...]
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 [...]
Whole-Disk Encryption Cracked
Early this week, some researchers at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy released a fascinating video of whole-disk encryption being cracked quite quickly and easily.
Whole-disk encryption products — such as PGP Whole Disk Encryption, TrueCrypt System Encryption, and Windows Vista’s BitLocker — work by encrypting the entire hard disk with a symmetric key, save [...]
