Research in Motion’s phones are considered the premiere maker of enterprise-grade mobile devices. But now a Russian firm says that a forensics tool it developed can reliably crack strong passwords used to secure the company’s BlackBerry phones.
One of the biggest talks at this year’s Black Hat Briefings was a presentation on the structural problem with digital certificate authorities by Moxie Marlinspike. The subsequent hack of Dutch certificate authority DigiNotar and a damning report on that attack only weeks later, and more recent reports of exploitable holes in both TLS and SSL only underscore the problems facing the entire PKI-based system for ensuring online identities.
Microsoft has relased a security advisory about the TLS/SSL attack developed by Juliano Rizzo and Thai Duong and also has made a FixIt tool available to help server administrators switch on support for newer versions of the protocol that aren’t vulnerable to the attack.
The revelation last week that researchers Thai Duong and Juliano Rizzo had developed a new attack on SSL that gives them the ability to decrypt some protected sessions on the fly sparked a lot of discussions about the inherent problems of the protocol and whether it has outlived its usefulness. But it’s not just SSL that’s the problem; it’s the slow accumulation of security problems in the key protocols and systems on which the Internet–and much of our world–rely that has become the real issue.
Adobe said on Friday that its products would soon reject certificates issued by the disgraced Dutch certificate authority DigiNotar following the Dutch government’s decision, Friday, to revoke DigiNotar PKIoverheid CA certificates used by government agencies on September 28.
Microsoft officials are seeking to assuage concerns that its implementation of UEFI in Windows 8 will prevent users from loading non-Microsoft operating systems or applications on their machines. Despite concerns raised by security researchers and open-source advocates about vendor lock-in and other issues arising from the use of a secure boot sequence in the upcoming OS, Microsoft says “the customer is in control of their PC.”
With the release of the BEAST SSL attack research due tomorrow, researchers are beginning to take note of potential fixes and mitigations for the attack. One of the possibilities is moving to newer versions of TLS that are not vulnerable to the attack, but the problem is that there is precious little adoption of those newer versions.
Following the success of the Firesheep application, a new Android application called DroidSheep allows users to hijack Web sessions of popular online services over insecure Wifi connections.
Windows 8, like Windows 7 and Vista before it, is being touted as the most secure version of Windows ever. In past releases, many of the security improvements have come through exploit mitigations such as ASLR and DEP and better software security practices during development. In Windows 8, however, one of the major changes is the addition of UEFI, a BIOS replacement that will include a secure boot sequence to help prevent low-level malware infections. That change, however, is not sitting well with everyone.
Hundreds of business leaders and academics joined Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Attorney General Martha Coakley to launch the state’s Advanced Cyber Security Center (ACSC), one of the first of its kind in the nation.
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