terrorism
DefCon 19, Day 1
Having finished with BlackHat, I checked out of the Flamingo and moved to DefCon’s new location this year, the Rio. This was an enormous upgrade from the Riviera, the previous location. For one, the conference center is nearly 50% bigger, and it’s beautiful. Traffic flow was greatly improved, despite record attendance (~12,000, from estimates I’ve [...]
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?”
A “Clear” Case of Failure
Clear, the “trusted traveler” program that allowed customers to bypass airport security lines, has shut down. The story is an interesting case of bureaucratic disincentives and general failure around the whole mess known as airport security. A privately-run alternative to the TSA’s Registered Traveller program, Clear started out with what seemed like a good idea [...]
Data Hiding at the Airport
According to the EFF blog, customs has taken to randomly searching electronic devices for suspicious data. It is somewhat mysterious what they are searching them for — given only a few minutes and a technically unskilled border guard doing the searching, it’s hard to imagine them actually finding anything better hidden than a file on [...]
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 [...]
