Bruce Schneier

Clever: Quantum cryptography is often touted as being perfectly secure. It is based on the principle that you cannot make measurements of a quantum system without disturbing it. So, in theory, it is impossible for an eavesdropper to intercept a quantum encryption key without disrupting it in a noticeable way, triggering alarm bells. Vadim Makarov at the Norwegian University of...

This is beyond stupid: The Pentagon is contemplating an aggressive approach to defending its computer systems that includes preemptive actions such as knocking out parts of an adversary's computer network overseas—but it is still wrestling with how to pursue the strategy legally. The department is developing a range of weapons capabilities, including tools that would allow "attack and exploitation of...

As part of NIST's SHA-3 selection process, people have been implementing the candidate hash functions on a variety of hardware and software platforms. Our team has implemented Skein in Intel's 32 nm ASIC process, and got some impressive performance results (presentation and paper). Several other groups have implemented Skein in FPGA and ASIC, and have seen significantly poorer performance. We...

Skein is my new hash function. Well, "my" is an overstatement; I'm one of the eight designers. It was submitted to NIST for their SHA-3 competition, and one of the 14 algorithms selected to advance to the second round. Here's the Skein paper; source code is here. The Skein website is here. Last week was the Second SHA-3 Candidate Conference....

"Protecting your daily in-home activity information from a wireless snooping attack," by Vijay Srinivasan, John Stankovic, and Kamin Whitehouse: Abstract: In this paper, we first present a new privacy leak in residential wireless ubiquitous computing systems, and then we propose guidelines for designing future systems to prevent this problem. We show that we can observe private activities in the home...

In Australia: A high school teacher who assigned her class to plan a terrorist attack that would kill as many innocent people as possible had no intent to promote terrorism, the school principal said yesterday. The Year-10 students at Kalgoorlie-Boulder Community High School were asked to pretend they were terrorists making a political statement by releasing a chemical or biological...

Chilling: How do most wrongful convictions come about? The primary cause is mistaken identification. Actually, I wouldn't call it mistaken identification; I'd call it misidentification, because you often find that there was some sort of misconduct by the police. In a lot of cases, the victim initially wasn't so sure. And then the police say, "Oh, no, you got the...

Since a fatal crash a few years ago, Boston T (their subway) operators have been forbidden from using -- or even having -- cell phones while on the job. Passengers are encouraged to report violators. But sometimes T operators need to use their official radios on the job, and passengers can't tell the difference. The solution: orange tape: The solution?...

Pretty....

Back in May, I attended the EastWest Institute's First Worldwide Cybersecurity Summit in Dallas. I only had eight minutes to speak, and tried to turn the dialog to security, privacy, and the individual. EDITED TO ADD (9/1): Commentary....

Full-body scanners in roving vans: American Science & Engineering, a company based in Billerica, Massachusetts, has sold U.S. and foreign government agencies more than 500 backscatter x-ray scanners mounted in vans that can be driven past neighboring vehicles to see their contents, Joe Reiss, a vice president of marketing at the company told me in an interview. This should be...

Research paper: Detecting Deceptive Discussions in Conference Calls, by David F. Larcker and Anastasia A. Zakolyukina. Abstract: We estimate classification models of deceptive discussions during quarterly earnings conference calls. Using data on subsequent financial restatements (and a set of criteria to identify especially serious accounting problems), we label the Question and Answer section of each call as "truthful" or "deceptive"....

From danah boyd: Carmen is engaging in social steganography. She's hiding information in plain sight, creating a message that can be read in one way by those who aren't in the know and read differently by those who are. She's communicating to different audiences simultaneously, relying on specific cultural awareness to provide the right interpretive lens. While she's focused primarily...

And you thought fingerprints were intrusive. The Wright State Research Institute is developing a ground-breaking system that would scan the skeletal structures of people at airports, sports stadiums, theme parks and other public places that could be vulnerable to terrorist attacks, child abductions or other crimes. The images would then quickly be matched with potential suspects using a database of...

This is a first, I think: The airline's central computer which registered technical problems on planes was infected by Trojans at the time of the fatal crash and this resulted in a failure to raise an alarm over multiple problems with the plane, according to Spanish daily El Pais (report here). The plane took off with flaps and slats retracted,...

Who knew? "Hulse was shooting with burst mode on his camera, so I know exactly what the interval is between the frames and I can calculate velocity of squid flying though the air," O'Dor says. "We now think there are dozens of species that do it. Squid are used to gliding in the water, so the same physiology probably allows...

Intel buys McAfee. It's another example of a large non-security company buying a security company. I've been talking about this sort of thing for two and a half years: It's not consolidation as we're used to. In the security industry, there are waves of consolidation, you know, big companies scoop up little companies and then there's lots of consolidation. You've...

Good essay by Seth Godin: We pay the fear tax every time we spend time or money seeking reassurance. We pay it twice when the act of seeking that reassurance actually makes us more anxious, not less. We pay the tax when we cover our butt instead of doing the right thing, and we pay the tax when we take...

The Crypto 2010 Conference is going on right now at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Springer-Verlag publishes the proceedings, but they're available as a free download for the next few days....

Still minor, but this kind of thing is only going to get worse: The new research shows that other systems in the vehicle are similarly insecure. The tire pressure monitors are notable because they're wireless, allowing attacks to be made from adjacent vehicles. The researchers used equipment costing $1,500, including radio sensors and special software, to eavesdrop on, and interfere...