Ramblings & ephemera
From Bruce Schneier’s “Quantum Cryptography” (Crypto-Gram: 15 November 2008):
Quantum cryptography is back in the news, and the basic idea is still unbelievably cool, in theory, and nearly useless in real life.
The idea behind quantum crypto is that two people communicating using a quantum channel can be absolutely sure no one is eavesdropping. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle [...]
Posted on June 27th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “Second SHB Workshop Liveblogging (4)” (Schneier on Security: 11 June 2009):
Diana Smetters, Palo Alto Research Center …, started with these premises: you can teach users, but you can’t teach them very much, so you’d better carefully design systems so that you 1) minimize what they have to learn, 2) make it easier [...]
Posted on June 13th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “Security in Ten Years” (Crypto-Gram: 15 December 2007):
Bruce Schneier: … The nature of the attacks will be different: the targets, tactics and results. Security is both a trade-off and an arms race, a balance between attacker and defender, and changes in technology upset that balance. Technology might make one particular tactic more [...]
Posted on February 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Jeffrey Goldberg’s “The Things He Carried” (The Atlantic: November 2008):
Because the TSA’s security regimen seems to be mainly thing-based—most of its 44,500 airport officers are assigned to truffle through carry-on bags for things like guns, bombs, three-ounce tubes of anthrax, Crest toothpaste, nail clippers, Snapple, and so on—I focused my efforts on bringing bad [...]
Posted on December 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Stephen J. Dubner’s interview with Bruce Schneier in “Bruce Schneier Blazes Through Your Questions” (The New York Times: 4 December 2007):
There’s a huge difference between nosy neighbors and cameras. Cameras are everywhere. Cameras are always on. Cameras have perfect memory. It’s not the surveillance we’ve been used to; it’s wholesale surveillance. I wrote about [...]
Posted on December 17th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Stephen J. Dubner’s interview with Bruce Schneier in “Bruce Schneier Blazes Through Your Questions” (The New York Times: 4 December 2007):
This is true in many aspects of our society. Here’s what I said in my book, Secrets and Lies (page 389): “As technology becomes more complicated, society’s experts become more specialized. And in almost [...]
Posted on December 17th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Stephen J. Dubner’s interview with Bruce Schneier in “Bruce Schneier Blazes Through Your Questions” (The New York Times: 4 December 2007):
Basically, you’re asking if crime pays. Most of the time, it doesn’t, and the problem is the different risk characteristics. If I make a computer security mistake — in a book, for a consulting [...]
Posted on December 17th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Stephen J. Dubner’s interview with Bruce Schneier in “Bruce Schneier Blazes Through Your Questions” (The New York Times: 4 December 2007):
Identity theft is a problem for two reasons. One, personal identifying information is incredibly easy to get; and two, personal identifying information is incredibly easy to use. Most of our security measures have tried [...]
Posted on December 17th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “Gathering ‘Storm’ Superworm Poses Grave Threat to PC Nets” (Wired: 4 October 2007):
Storm represents the future of malware. Let’s look at its behavior:
1. Storm is patient. A worm that attacks all the time is much easier to detect; a worm that attacks and then shuts off for a while [...]
Posted on November 22nd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “Getting Free Food at a Fast-Food Drive-In” (Crypto-Gram: 15 September 2007):
It’s easy. Find a fast-food restaurant with two drive-through windows: one where you order and pay, and the other where you receive your food. This won’t work at the more-common U.S. configuration: a microphone where you order, and a single window where [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “News” (Crypto-Gram: 15 September 2007):
Taser — yep, that’s the company’s name as well as the product’s name — is now selling a personal-use version of their product. It’s called the Taser C2, and it has an interesting embedded identification technology. Whenever the weapon is fired, it also sprays some serial-number bar-coded confetti, [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “Basketball Referees and Single Points of Failure” (Crypto-Gram: 15 September 2007):
What sorts of systems — IT, financial, NBA games, or whatever — are most at risk of being manipulated? The ones where the smallest change can have the greatest impact, and the ones where trusted insiders can make that change.
…
It’s not [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “First Responders” (Crypto-Gram: 15 September 2007):
In 2004, the U.S. Conference of Mayors issued a report on communications interoperability. In 25% of the 192 cities surveyed, the police couldn’t communicate with the fire department. In 80% of cities, municipal authorities couldn’t communicate with the FBI, FEMA, and other federal agencies.
The source of the [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “My Open Wireless Network” (Crypto-Gram: 15 January 2008):
A company called Fon has an interesting approach to this problem. Fon wireless access points have two wireless networks: a secure one for you, and an open one for everyone else. You can configure your open network in either “Bill” or “Linus” mode: In the [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “Anonymity and the Netflix Dataset” (Crypto-Gram: 15 January 2008):
The point of the research was to demonstrate how little information is required to de-anonymize information in the Netflix dataset.
…
What the University of Texas researchers demonstrate is that this process isn’t hard, and doesn’t require a lot of data. It turns out that [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Victor Bogado da Silva Lins’ letter in Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram (15 May 2004):
You mentioned in your last crypto-gram newsletter about a cover that makes a license plate impossible to read from certain angles. Brazilian people have thought in another low-tech solution for the same “problem”, they simply tie some ribbons to the plate or [...]
Posted on April 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Les Jones’s email in Bruce Schneier’s “Crypto-Gram” (15 August 2005):
Avoiding rescuers is a common reaction in people who have been lost in the woods. See Dwight McCarter’s book, “Lost,” an account of search and rescue operations in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In one chapter McCarter tells the story of two backpackers in [...]
Posted on April 15th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “Crypto-Gram” (15 August 2005):
At DefCon earlier this month, a group was able to set up an unamplified 802.11 network at a distance of 124.9 miles.
http://www.enterpriseitplanet.com/networking/news/…
http://pasadena.net/shootout05/
Even more important, the world record for communicating with a passive RFID device was set at 69 feet. Remember that the next time someone tells you that it’s [...]
Posted on April 15th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “The Strange Story of Dual_EC_DRBG” (Crypto-Gram: 15 November 2007):
This year, the U.S. government released a new official standard for random number generators, which will likely be followed by software and hardware developers around the world. Called NIST Special Publication 800-90, the 130-page document contains four different approved techniques, called DRBGs, or “Deterministic [...]
Posted on April 12th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “Hacking Computers Over USB” (Crypto-Gram: 15 June 2005):
From CSO Magazine:
“Plug an iPod or USB stick into a PC running Windows and the device can literally take over the machine and search for confidential documents, copy them back to the iPod or USB’s internal storage, and hide them as “deleted” files. Alternatively, the [...]
Posted on December 10th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security, tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
