news

iPhone Bandit Foiled

Sat, 25 Dec 2010 18:02:38 +0100

The iPhone may be a great smartphone, but as a substitute for a firearm in committing an armed robbery, it leaves something to be desired. That's what Jerome Taylor discovered yesterday when he tried to rob an Indian restaurant in New London, Connecticut, with his Apple mobile.

Taylor, 20, wearing a mask, entered the Northern Indian restaurant through a service entrance yesterday afternoon and demanded money from the eatery's cooks with what they thought was a small handgun, the New London Day reported. When the cooks brandished their kitchen knives and refused to comply with Taylor's demand, the would-be thief apologized and said he was just trying to scrape up some cash for his kid.

After Taylor fled the scene, the cooks debated whether or not to notify the police about the robbery attempt in light of the holiday season, but they dropped a dime on him anyway. Several hours later, police apprehended Taylor after a foot chase through the streets of New London. When interrogated by the coppers, Taylor confessed that his "handgun" was really a black iPhone.

The hapless bandit also told police that his child was staying with a relative in a nearby town. Police are running down that story to make sure the child isn't in any danger.

Taylor has been charged with interfering with police, first-degree criminal attempt to commit first-degree robbery and criminal attempt to commit sixth-degree larceny. Fortunately for Taylor, spending money on an iPhone instead of Christmas presents for your kid isn't a crime in the eyes of the law.

The clock is ticking on encryption

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 16:40:44 +0100

In the indictment that led to the expulsion of ten Russian spies from the U.S. in the summer of 2010, the FBI said that it gained access to their communications after surreptitiously entering one of the spies' homes, during which agents found a piece of paper with a 27-character password.

In other words, the FBI found it more productive to burglarize a house than to crack a 216-bit code, despite having the computational resources of the U.S. government behind it.

That's because modern cryptography, when used correctly, is rock solid. Cracking an encrypted message can require time framesthat dwarf the age of the universe.

That's the case today. But within the foreseeable future, cracking those same codes could become trivial, thanks to quantum computing.

The encryption landscape

"The entire commercial world runs off the assumption that encryption is rock solid and is not breakable" says Joe Moorcones, vice president at SafeNet Inc., an information security firm in Belcamp, Md.

There are two kinds of encryption algorithms used in enterprise-level communications security -- symmetric and asymmetric (also called public-key encryption), he explains. Symmetric algorithms are typically used to send the actual information, where asymmetric algorithms are used to send both the information and the keys.

Symmetric encryption requires that the sender and receiver both employ the same algorithm and the same encription key. Decryption is simply the reverse of the encryption process -- hence the "symmetric" name.

There are numerous symmetric algorithms available, but Moorcones says that, at the enterprise level, nearly everyone uses the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), published in 2001 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology after five years of testing. It replaced the Data Encryption Standard (DES), which debuted in 1976 and uses a 56-bit key.

Typically using keys that are either 128 or 256 bits long, AES has never been broken, while DES can now be broken in a matter hours, Moorcones says. AES is approved for sensitive U.S. government information that is not classified, he adds.

As for classified information, the algorithms used to protect it are, of course, themselves classified. "They're more of the same -- they put in more bells and whistles to make them harder to crack," says Charles Kolodgy, analyst at IDC, a market research firm in Framingham, Mass. And they use multiple algorithms, he says.

Though rumors have long swirled around the idea, well-respected sources universally reject the idea that AES has a "back ddoor" that allows the government to read messages encrypted with it. "It's been too heavily scrutinized," says Paul Kocher, head of Cryptography Research Inc., in San Francisco. "They would have to put in a back door that no one else could see, and to be able to do that they would have to be years ahead of everyone else, and that is unlikely."

whose time has come ......

Sat, 27 Nov 2010 16:27:20 +0100

Cloud computing is an idea 'whose time has come', it has been claimed.

According to a recent study by Frost & Sullivan, the majority of businesses have either entered discussion regarding cloud computing or have already deployed the technology.

The trend comes despite Frost & Sullivan highlighting speculation that the technology is 'yet another vaporware'.

Arun Chandrasekaran, research manager at the organisation, explained: 'There is a growing awareness amongst consumers and enterprises to access their information technology resources extensively through a 'utility' model, a development broadly called 'cloud computing'.

'Cloud represents the next wave in the computing industry, as it strives to eliminate inherent inefficiencies in the existing IT architecture and deliver 'IT as a service' to the end-users.'

The survey also showed that almost 25 per cent of enterprises currently use some form of cloud computing, while more than 50 per cent believe that the technology can help businesses reduce their infrastructure costs and lower capital expenditure investment