Linux Cryptography - Page 28 - Results from #540

Discover Cryptography News

How to encrypt email with PGP or GPG

data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg%20xmlns=%22http://www.w3.org/2000/svg%22%20viewBox=%220%200%20100%20100%22%3E%3C/svg%3E

One of the best ways to protect the privacy of email communications is to use PGP (pretty good privacy) and the Open Source GPG. Unfortunately, even hardcore geeks sometimes find PGP difficult to set up, configure, use, and troubleshoot. Recognizing this problem, No Starch Press has published a simple guide to using PGP and GPG. In "PGP & GPG: Email for the Practical Paranoid" (No Starch Press, April 2006), author Michael Lucas offers an easy-to-read, informal tutorial for communicating securely with PGP.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Apr 07, 2006

Password Recovery Speeds

This document shows the approximate amount of time required for a computer or a cluster of computers to guess various passwords. The figures shown are approximate and are the maximum time required to guess each password using a simple brute force "key-search" attack, it may (and probably will) be possible to guess correctly without trying all the combinations shown using other methods of attack or by having a "lucky guess".

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Apr 05, 2006

A Pretty Good Way to Foil the NSA

How easy is it for the average internet user to make a phone call secure enough to frustrate the NSA's extrajudicial surveillance program? Wired News took Phil Zimmermann's newest encryption software, Zfone, for a test drive and found it's actually quite easy, even if the program is still in beta. Zimmermann, the man who released the PGP e-mail encryption program to the world in 1991 -- only to face an abortive criminal prosecution from the government -- has been trying for 10 years to give the world easy-to-use software to cloak internet phone calls.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Apr 04, 2006

Steganography FAQ

Steganography is a subject which is rarely touched upon by most IT Security Enthusiasts. Most people don't see Steganography has a potential threat, some people don't even know what Steganography is. With this FAQ I hope to answer any questions anyone may want to ask about Steganography, and to educate people so they can understand what exactly Steganography is. Is Steganography a potential threat? Well your about to find out.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Mar 29, 2006

Encrypt filesystems with EncFS and Loop-AES

Encrypted filesystems may be overkill for family photos or your résumé, but they make sense for network-accessible servers that hold sensitive business documents, databases that contain credit-card information, offline backups, and laptops. EncFS and Loop-AES, which are both released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), are two approaches to encrypting Linux filesystems. I'll compare the two and then look at other alternatives.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Mar 21, 2006

Tunnels in Hash Functions - MD5 Collisions Within a Minute

In this paper we introduce a new idea of tunneling of hash functions. In some sense tunnels replace multi-message modification methods and exponentially accelerate collision search. We describe in one minute on a standard notebook PC (Intel Pentium 1.6 GHz). The method works for any intializing value. Tunneling is a general idea, which can be used for finding collisions of other hash functions, such as SHA-1, 2. We show several capabilities of tunnels. A program, which source code is available on a project homepage, experimentally verified the method.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Mar 20, 2006

An introduction to Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) has been gaining momentum as a replacement for RSA public key cryptography largely based on its efficiency, but also because the US National Security Agency (NSA) included it, while excluding RSA, from its Suite B cryptography recommendations. Suite B is a set of algorithms that the NSA recommends for use in protecting both classified and unclassified US government information and systems. Public key cryptography is the basis for tools like ssh as well as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) for encrypting web traffic. For readers who would like more information, a nice introduction to public key cryptography and the RSA algorithm can be found on Wikipedia.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Mar 17, 2006

Philip Zimmermann releases Zfone for Linux

Phil Zimmermann thinks Zfone is better than the other approaches to secure VoIP, because it achieves security without reliance on a PKI, key certification, trust models, certificate authorities, or key management complexity that bedevils the email encryption world.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Mar 15, 2006

Cryptography in the Database: The Last Line of Defense

Excerpt: This chapter discusses how cryptography can address the concerns raised in the previous chapter. After explaining what cryptography is and providing a general idea of how it works, we dig into the various types of cryptographic algorithms and see where the strengths and weaknesses of each lie.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Mar 14, 2006

Distributed Computing Cracks Enigma Code

More than 60 years after the end of World War II, a distributed computing project has managed to crack a previously uncracked message that was encrypted using the Enigma machine. The M4 Project began in early January, as an attempt to break three original Enigma messages that were intercepted in 1942 and are thought never to have been broken by the Allied forces.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Mar 06, 2006

US boffins tune up optical quantum cryptography

A team of Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists, in collaboration with researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., and Albion College, in Albion, Mich., have achieved quantum key distribution (QKD) at telecommunications industry wavelengths in a 50-kilometer (31 mile) optical fiber. According to the researchers, the work could accelerate the development of QKD for secure communications in optical fibers at distances far beyond current technological limits.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Feb 21, 2006

Decrypting Encryption Myths

Some of the more prominent headlines over the past year were dominated by incidents of data theft, where corporation after corporation had fallen victim to information theft on a large scale. While many victims had hackers and devious insiders to blame, other instances were simply due to human error such as lost data tapes and stolen laptops. In these cases, CIOs may think their information is not at risk because of encryption. But is this really enough?

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Feb 09, 2006

NIST updates cryptography guidelines for U.S. Federal Agencies

In a bid to help U.S. federal agencies protect sensitive, but unclassified information, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has updated guidelines for selecting and implementing cryptographic methods. Originally published in 1999, Guideline for Implementing Cryptography in the Federal Government (NIST Special Publication 800-21-1) is intended primarily for federal employees who design computer systems and procure, install and operate security products to meet specific needs.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Jan 31, 2006

OpenSSL receives FIPS certification

The Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CMVP), a joint effort of the US and Canadian governments, approved the validation of the OpenSSL open source security toolkit for implementation of the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols on Friday.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Jan 23, 2006

Encryption: A nice idea that few want to implement?

Companies are not embracing encryption as a way to protect sensitive data. According to Ponemon Institute's 2005 National Encryption Survey, only 4.2% of companies responding to our survey say their organizations have an enterprisewide encryption plan. However, the study also reveals that encryption is viewed by many as an important security tool that enhances the IT professionals' overall sense of trust or comfort in data-protection efforts. The primary reasons cited for not encrypting sensitive or confidential information were concern about system performance (69%), complexity (44%) and cost (25%). (See "Securing Card Data Isn't An Easy Sell.")

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Dec 23, 2005

OpenSSH cutting edge

Federico Biancuzzi interviews OpenSSH developer Damien Miller to discuss features included in the upcoming version 4.3, public key crypto protocols details, timing based attacks and anti-worm measures.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Dec 20, 2005

Hold the Photons!

How would you feel if you invested millions of dollars in quantum cryptography, and then learned that you could do the same thing with a few 25-cent Radio Shack components? I'm exaggerating a little here, but if a new idea out of Texas A&M University turns out to be secure, we've come close.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Dec 20, 2005

Encryption is not enough for DRM

Now let’s be clear right from the start that if you want to have any kind of control over the content of an electronic document you have first of all got to use encryption. But encryption is only the start of implementing a DRM service. Poorly packaged encryption, badly thought out licensing, integration that exposes weaknesses in the packaging of the method for displaying the document, are all ways in which even the most powerful encryption system can be made useless. And, of course, there is the very important question about what is actually encrypted, and what, if anything, is not.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Dec 09, 2005

Deciphering laptop encryption

During the past two weeks, I started up a disk encryption project, one of the technology initiatives under my company's intellectual asset protection program. Our goal with the disk encryption effort is to prevent the loss of intellectual property stemming from the theft of a laptop. On several occasions, executives' laptops have gone missing or been stolen. One of those missing laptops contained intellectual property and sensitive data, including information on a pending acquisition, product strategy and road maps. Luckily, it was recovered.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Dec 06, 2005

RSA-640 Factored

A team at the German Federal Agency for Information Technology Security (BSI) recently announced the factorization of the 193-digit number known as RSA-640. The team responsible for this factorization is the same one that previously factored the 174-digit number known as RSA-576 and the 200-digit number known as RSA-200.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Nov 09, 2005

Linux Cryptography - Page 28

How Passkey Solutions Enhance Open-Source Security

Abyss Locker Ransomware Targets Linux & Windows Users

Linux Foundation Joins Post-Quantum Cryptography Alliance