In a recent article by Scahill and Begley, we learned that the CIA is interested in targeting Apple products. I largely agree with the quote from Steve Bellovin, that “spies gonna spy”, so of course they’re interested in targeting the platform that rides in the pockets of many of their intelligence collection targets. What could […]
Archives for 2015
Threshold signatures for Bitcoin wallets are finally here
March 8, 2015 by
Today we are pleased to release our paper presenting a new ECDSA threshold signature scheme that is particularly well-suited for securing Bitcoin wallets. We teamed up with cryptographer Rosario Gennaro to build this scheme. Threshold signatures can be thought of as “stealth multi-signatures.”
FREAK Attack: The Chickens of ‘90s Crypto Restriction Come Home to Roost
March 3, 2015 by
Today researchers disclosed a new security flaw in TLS/SSL, the protocol used to secure web connections. The flaw is significant in itself, but it is also a good example of what can go wrong when government asks to build weaknesses into security systems. Back in the early 1990s, it was illegal to export most products […]
A clear line between offense and defense
February 26, 2015 by
The New York Times, in an editorial today entitled “Arms Control for a Cyberage“, writes, The problem is that unlike conventional weapons, with cyberweapons “there’s no clear line between offense and defense,” as President Obama noted this month in an interview with Re/code, a technology news publication. Defense in cyberwarfare consists of pre-emptively locating the […]
We can de-anonymize programmers from coding style. What are the implications?
February 26, 2015 by
In a recent post, I talked about our paper showing how to identify anonymous programmers from their coding styles. We used a combination of lexical features (e.g., variable name choices), layout features (e.g., spacing), and syntactic features (i.e., grammatical structure of source code) to represent programmers’ coding styles. The previous post focused on the overall […]
