About
Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
SAN FRANCISCO– It’s been an interesting year in the cryptography world, with new attacks on several algorithms, continued problems with hash functions and the recent research on weak RSA keys. With all of that as a backdrop, some of the brightest minds in the field, gathered here for the RSA Conference, said that there are some worrying cracks showing in the cryptosystems that secure electronic communications.
Dennis Fisher talks with cryptographer and author Bruce Schneier about his new book, Liars and Outliers, the role of trust in society and security, the ways in which technology helps promote trust and how various groups and actors defect the norm and take advantage of that trust.
This has turned out to be an interesting week for privacy. Just a few days after the White House laid out is privacy agenda, the California attorney general has announced an agreement with several major mobile platform providers, including Apple and Google, that will have the companies provide privacy statements for apps before users download them.
A new version of the Flashback Trojan that targets Macs has appeared, and this one uses a drive-by download technique to attempt exploits of two Java vulnerabilities. The Flashback.G malware also tries to trick users into accepting a fake digital certificate, which will install the malware if the Java exploits fail.
Apple has pushed back the deadline for developers to include a sandbox in all of the apps on the Mac App Store, giving them a reprieve until June 1. The deadline was set for March 1, but Apple has changed it in order to give developers more time to work with the new requirements.
The Obama administration today unveiled a new consumer-privacy plan designed to help better protect users’ rights online, including a privacy “bill of rights” that spells out exactly what consumers should expect from the companies they work with online. In conjunction with this new initiative, Google has said that it finally will add the do-not-track button to its Chrome browser.
Context is a funny thing. In most segments of society, Apple is seen as an exemplary company, with an unrivaled record of innovation, much-admired ad campaigns and a stock price that is the envy of every company not named Google. But in the security community, Apple is regarded with some combination of disbelief, confusion and the disdain that once was reserved for Microsoft.
Thanks to the wonderful tendency of users not to update their applications, old vulnerabilities never die, they just get overtaken by newer and shinier ones. The attackers know this well, and every once in a while they serve up a nice reminder to the rest of us. The most recent one of these is a string of attacks against an Adobe Reader vulnerability from 2010.
Apple’s implementation of a semi-new set of technologies collectively known as Gatekeeper in the upcoming Mountain Lion release of Mac OS X is set to give users better control of the security of the machines, specifically which apps are allowed to run. The Gatekeeper system will enable users to decide which apps they trust and then prevent pretty much anything else from running.
The relations among Microsoft, Apple and Google, which are testy in the best of circumstances, are being pressured even more of late as the controversy surrounding Google’s actions with cookies and user tracking grows. In the latest installment, Microsoft has said that it has found that Google “is employing similar methods to get around the default privacy protections in IE and track IE users with cookies.”
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