Schneier on Security

From NPR: Based on surveys Barnes collected, the top five worries of parents are, in order: Kidnapping School snipers Terrorists Dangerous strangers Drugs But how do children really get hurt or killed? Car accidents Homicide (usually committed by a person who knows the child, not a stranger) Abuse Suicide Drowning Why such a big discrepancy between worries and reality? Barnes...

If you're a typical wired American, you've got a bunch of tech tools you like and a bunch more you covet. You have a cell phone that can easily text. You've got a laptop configured just the way you want it. Maybe you have a Kindle for reading, or an iPad. And when the next new thing comes along, some...

Back in 2007, I wrote an essay, "Portrait of the Modern Terrorist as an Idiot," where I said: The JFK Airport plotters seem to have been egged on by an informant, a twice-convicted drug dealer. An FBI informant almost certainly pushed the Fort Dix plotters to do things they wouldn't have ordinarily done. The Miami gang's Sears Tower plot was...

Squid car....

Interesting: Who are these certificate authorities? At the beginning of Web history, there were only a handful of companies, like Verisign, Equifax, and Thawte, that made near-monopoly profits from being the only providers trusted by Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. But over time, browsers have trusted more and more organizations to verify Web sites. Safari and Firefox now trust more...

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,...