Encryption Is Less Secure Than We Thought
August 14th, 2013Via: MIT News:
Information theory — the discipline that gave us digital communication and data compression — also put cryptography on a secure mathematical foundation. Since 1948, when the paper that created information theory first appeared, most information-theoretic analyses of secure schemes have depended on a common assumption.
Unfortunately, as a group of researchers at MIT and the National University of Ireland (NUI) at Maynooth, demonstrated in a paper presented at the recent International Symposium on Information Theory (view PDF), that assumption is false. In a follow-up paper being presented this fall at the Asilomar Conference on Signals and Systems, the same team shows that, as a consequence, the wireless card readers used in many keyless-entry systems may not be as secure as previously thought.
In information theory, the concept of information is intimately entwined with that of entropy. Two digital files might contain the same amount of information, but if one is shorter, it has more entropy. If a compression algorithm — such as WinZip or gzip — worked perfectly, the compressed file would have the maximum possible entropy. That means that it would have the same number of 0s and 1s, and the way in which they were distributed would be totally unpredictable. In information-theoretic parlance, it would be perfectly uniform.
Traditionally, information-theoretic analyses of secure schemes have assumed that the source files are perfectly uniform. In practice, they rarely are, but they’re close enough that it appeared that the standard mathematical analyses still held.
“We thought we’d establish that the basic premise that everyone was using was fair and reasonable,” says Ken Duffy, one of the researchers at NUI. “And it turns out that it’s not.” On both papers, Duffy is joined by his student Mark Christiansen; Muriel Médard, a professor of electrical engineering at MIT; and her student Flávio du Pin Calmon.
The problem, Médard explains, is that information-theoretic analyses of secure systems have generally used the wrong notion of entropy. They relied on so-called Shannon entropy, named after the founder of information theory, Claude Shannon, who taught at MIT from 1956 to 1978.
Shannon entropy is based on the average probability that a given string of bits will occur in a particular type of digital file. In a general-purpose communications system, that’s the right type of entropy to use, because the characteristics of the data traffic will quickly converge to the statistical averages. Although Shannon’s seminal 1948 paper dealt with cryptography, it was primarily concerned with communication, and it used the same measure of entropy in both discussions.
But in cryptography, the real concern isn’t with the average case but with the worst case. A codebreaker needs only one reliable correlation between the encrypted and unencrypted versions of a file in order to begin to deduce further correlations. In the years since Shannon’s paper, information theorists have developed other notions of entropy, some of which give greater weight to improbable outcomes. Those, it turns out, offer a more accurate picture of the problem of codebreaking.
When Médard, Duffy and their students used these alternate measures of entropy, they found that slight deviations from perfect uniformity in source files, which seemed trivial in the light of Shannon entropy, suddenly loomed much larger. The upshot is that a computer turned loose to simply guess correlations between the encrypted and unencrypted versions of a file would make headway much faster than previously expected.
“It’s still exponentially hard, but it’s exponentially easier than we thought,” Duffy says. One implication is that an attacker who simply relied on the frequencies with which letters occur in English words could probably guess a user-selected password much more quickly than was previously thought. “Attackers often use graphics processors to distribute the problem,” Duffy says. “You’d be surprised at how quickly you can guess stuff.”
Your Thoughts Can Release Abilities Beyond Normal Limits
August 14th, 2013Via: Scientific American:
There seems to be a simple way to instantly increase a person’s level of general knowledge. Psychologists Ulrich Weger and Stephen Loughnan recently asked two groups of people to answer questions. People in one group were told that before each question, the answer would be briefly flashed on their screens — too quickly to consciously perceive, but slow enough for their unconscious to take it in. The other group was told that the flashes simply signaled the next question. In fact, for both groups, a random string of letters, not the answers, was flashed. But, remarkably, the people who thought the answers were flashed did better on the test. Expecting to know the answers made people more likely to get the answers right.
Our cognitive and physical abilities are in general limited, but our conceptions of the nature and extent of those limits may need revising. In many cases, thinking that we are limited is itself a limiting factor. There is accumulating evidence that suggests that our thoughts are often capable of extending our cognitive and physical limits.
Google: If You Use Gmail, You Have ‘No Legitimate Expectation Of Privacy’
August 14th, 2013Via: Business Insider:
If you happen to be one of the 400 million people who use Google’s Gmail service for sending and receiving emails, you shouldn’t have any expectation of privacy, according to a court briefing obtained by the Consumer Watchdog website.
In a motion filed last month by Google to have a class action complaint dismissed, Google’s lawyers reference a 1979 ruling, holding that people who turn over information to third parties shouldn’t expect that information to remain private.
From the filing (emphasis added):
Just as a sender of a letter to a business colleague cannot be surprised that the recipient’s assistant opens the letter, people who use web-based email today cannot be surprised if their communications are processed by the recipient’s ECS provider in the course of delivery. Indeed, “a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties.” Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735, 743-44 (1979). In particular, the Court noted that persons communicating through a service provided by an intermediary (in the Smith case, a telephone call routed through a telephone company) must necessarily expect that the communication will be subject to the intermediary’s systems. For example, the Court explained that in using the telephone, a person “voluntarily convey[s] numerical information to the telephone company and ‘expose[s]’ that information to its equipment in the ordinary course of business.” Id. at 744 (emphasis added).
…
“Google has finally admitted they don’t respect privacy,” said John M. Simpson, Consumer Watchdog’s Privacy Project director, in a news release. “People should take them at their word; if you care about your email correspondents’ privacy don’t use Gmail.”
More Fast and Furious Guns Surface at Crime Scenes in Mexico
August 14th, 2013Via: CBS:
Three more weapons from Fast and Furious have turned up at crime scenes in Mexico, CBS News has learned, as the toll from the controversial federal operation grows.
According to Justice Department tracing documents obtained by CBS News, all three guns are WASR-10 762-caliber Romanian rifles. Two were purchased by Fast and Furious suspect Uriel Patino in May and July of 2010. Sean Steward, who was convicted on gun charges in July 2012, purchased a third. The rifles were traced yesterday to the Lone Wolf gun shop in Glendale, Ariz.
During Fast and Furious and similar operations, federal agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) encouraged the Lone Wolf and other gun stores to sell massive amounts of weapons to questionable purchasers who allegedly trafficked them Mexican drug cartels.
Patino is said to have purchased 700 guns while under ATF’s watch. Ever since, a steady stream of the guns have been recovered at crime scenes in Mexico and the U.S. But the Justice Department has refused repeated requests from Congress and CBS News to provide a full accounting. An estimated 1,400 guns are still on the street or unaccounted for.
X-47B Lands on U.S. Aircraft Carrier
August 14th, 2013Via: Wired:
The Navy’s X-47B drone completed its newest round of tests off the Virginia shore last week, making it the first pilotless unmanned jet in history to land aboard a moving aircraft carrier — one of aviation’s most challenging maneuvers.
The Navy heralded the achievement as the future of warfare. “It isn’t very often you get a glimpse of the future,” said Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus in a statement. “Today, those of us aboard the USS George H.W. Bush got that chance as we witnessed the X-47B make its first-ever arrested landing aboard an aircraft carrier.”
…
The X-47B, developed by defense giant Northrop Grumman, was funded under a 2007 contract initially worth $635.8 million that has ballooned to $1.4 billion. Northrop Grumman enlisted the help of a dozen other companies, including General Electric, Dell, Moog, and Lockheed Martin, to carry out the contract. But for a project with such a hefty price tag, the X-47B will never be put into operational use. Instead, next year, four companies are expected to compete for a contract to design the next version of the X-47B with an eye toward putting them in the air in 2020, according to the Navy.
Taiwan Nuclear Power Plant Reportedly Leaking Radioactive Water
August 14th, 2013Via: The Hindu:
An aging nuclear power plant in Taiwan has been leaking radioactive wastewater for three and half years, according to a report released by the government’s watchdog this week.
The report by Control Yuan said spent fuel rod storage pools at the have leaked since December 2009.
The pools of the two reactors leaked 15,370 milliliters and 4,830 milliliters respectively, it said. Radioactive materials such as Caesium-137, Cobalt-60, Manganese-54, and Chromium-51 were detected in water collected at the site.
The First Nuclear Power Plant, on the northern coast, began commercial operation in 1979.
The report said operator Taiwan Power Co had failed to find the causes and the leaks continue.
Taipower said the leak was unavoidable because of condensation, but insisted that the storage pools were safe.
“All water leaked has been recycled. So it poses no threat to the environment,” company spokesman Chung-Cheng Lee said on Saturday. “We’ve provided the Control Yuan with several reasons but they declined to believe our explanation.” The report also directed Taipower to come up with solutions to problems of the shortage of capacity for spent rods at the plant.
Research Credit: RP
The Forgotten Cold War Plan That Put a Ring of Copper Around the Earth
August 14th, 2013Via: Wired:
During the summer of 1963, Earth looked a tiny bit like Saturn.
The same year that Martin Luther King, Jr. marched on Washington and Beatlemania was born, the United States launched half a billion whisker-thin copper wires into orbit in an attempt to install a ring around the Earth. It was called Project West Ford, and it’s a perfect, if odd, example of the Cold War paranoia and military mentality at work in America’s early space program.
The Air Force and Department of Defense envisioned the West Ford ring as the largest radio antenna in human history. Its goal was to protect the nation’s long-range communications in the event of an attack from the increasingly belligerent Soviet Union.
…
Concern about the clandestine and military nature of West Ford continued following this second launch. On May 24 of that year, the The Harvard Crimson quoted British radio astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell as saying, “The damage lies not with this experiment alone, but with the attitude of mind which makes it possible without international agreement and safeguards.”
Recent military operations in space had given the U.S. a reckless reputation, especially following 1962’s high-altitude nuclear test Starfish Prime. This famously bad idea dispersed radiation across the globe, spawning tropical auroras and delivering a debilitating electromagnetic pulse to Hawaiian cities.
Democracy Now On Amazon and Jeff Bezos
August 14th, 2013Disclosure: I have an affiliate relationship with Amazon.
The Democracy Now discussion below contains some legitimate gripes about Amazon, which I’ve covered on here in the past.
The most disturbing thing about Amazon (to me) is their work with CIA to build the agency’s new cloud computing infrastructure (news circa March 2013). That’s bad. But for a real thrill, let’s ask: Which U.S. companies with large footprints on the web aren’t colluding with U.S. intelligence? *silence* Learn from Lavabit. So what’s going on with the likes of Google and Facebook, etc.? A lot of ankle grabbing is my guess. I wouldn’t, however, be expecting splash pages to show up on those sites explaining how they’re shutting down because they refuse to collaborate with feds.
With the Bezos-buys-The Washington Post situation, in effect, we have a CIA contractor buying an old time CIA rag. *meh* People who talk about the Washington Post in reverential tones are just sad. It’s like the Hope and Change crowd. Give me a break. In the Democracy Now discussion, Jeff Cohen says, “The Washington Post has really been a newspaper of the bipartisan consensus.” That’s it.
If you want to make a point of criticizing Amazon’s labor practices, you better make the most of it while you can. Here’s where Amazon is headed; in a word, robots:
As for the bleating about the death of the traditional publishing model—It needs to die, and I’m glad that it’s dying. For all of the romantic talk about the age of local bookshops and publishers’ real or imagined appreciation of books and reading, etc. the publishers decided what was published! Sure, anyone could self publish, assuming that they could afford it, but that was not a trivial task in the old days. Selling those self published books would be another non trivial matter. With Amazon’s direct publishing model, many new authors, who would have never been published under the traditional system, are experiencing great success. This is a very positive development (for authors, not so much for publishers) and the fact that it wasn’t mentioned at all in the Democracy Now piece is incredible.
While we’re on about the big bad Amazon, let’s not forget about Amy Goodman: “Her silence about 9/11 is stunning.”
For people concerned with purity in their associations, the world as it is today is going to present one disappointment after another. I don’t know of any area where this is more true than with alternative news. Yep, Amazon is building computer systems for the CIA. That’s bad. What’s worse, if you ask me, is that one of the biggest figures in “alternative news” can’t deal with 9/11.
Thinking outside the box is good, as long as you understand that the “box” is really a Matryoshka doll.
Now, as for me earning money from being an Amazon Associate, I continue to be amazed that they even allow you guys to support Cryptogon in this manner. Here is a small selection of companies who have explicitly refused to allow Cryptogon to participate in revenue sharing programs:
REI
Sierra Trading Post
Overstock.com
Lehman’s
Dell Small Business
New York Mint
48HourPrint
I’m sure there are many others, but this is a list that was easy to pull.
The following companies initially allowed Cryptogon to participate in their revenue sharing programs, but subsequently terminated the relationships:
Google – Reason for termination: Bogus invalid-click explanation (look it up), and they held onto the earnings I’d accumulated. They get away with this hilarious fraud every day. I advocate the use of adblock+ because it’s bad for Google. I don’t even care that it blocks ads on my own site, by all means, use it!
Tradeking – No explanation for termination.
Swanson Health Products – They seem to want only want U.S. based affiliates now.
So, as for the claim in the piece below that Amazon is endangering, “The marketplace of ideas,” I’m living proof that this assertion is bullcrap.
But this CIA cloud business… *sigh*
So it goes.
Via: Democracy Now:
The Washington Post announced on Monday the paper had been sold to Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos for $250 million. Bezos, one of the world’s wealthiest men, now controls one of the most powerful newspapers in the country. Some critics of the sale have cited Bezos’ close ties to the U.S. government. In 2010, Amazon pulled the plug on hosting the WikiLeaks website under heavy political pressure. Earlier this year, Amazon inked a $600 million cloud-computing deal with the CIA. Independent booksellers and publishers have also long complained about Amazon’s business practices. We host a roundtable on the history of Amazon and the future of the newspaper industry. “Monopoly newspapers, especially The Washington Post in the nation’s capital, while it might not be a commercially viable undertaking, it still has tremendous political power,” says Robert McChesney, co-founder of Free Press. “What we have is a plaything for these billionaires that they can then use aggressively to promote their own politics.” Media critic Jeff Cohen notes that while The Washington Post notably published reports on Watergate and the Pentagon Papers decades ago, he thinks concerns that Bezos will ruin its journalistic tradition is unfounded, saying that in recent years, “The Washington Post has really been the newspaper of the bipartisan consensus.” We also speak to Dennis Johnson, publisher of Melville Books. “Amazon is a company that feels no pain. They’ve, as far as I can tell, never made money. … So, when you see him taking over The Washington Post and you wonder is he going to be able to monetize it, is he going to make it profitable, he probably doesn’t care,” Johnson says.
Research Credit: conceptualdecay
Egypt: At Least 149 Killed as Troops Clear Pro-Morsi Camps
August 14th, 2013Update: Egypt Declares State of Emergency
Via: Al Jazeera:
A state of emergency has been declared across Egypt, as security forces and supporters of deposed president Mohamed Morsi continue to clash around the country.
The announcement on Wednesday came amid a deadly crackdown by security forces on two pro-Morsi protest camps in Cairo.
The health ministry said at least 149 people had been killed in clashes around the country, but some members of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood said the death toll was much higher.
The state of emergency began at 4pm local time (14:00 GMT) and will last for a month, the presidency said in a statement.
The exceptional measures were taken as “the security and order of the nation face danger due to deliberate sabotage, and attacks on public and private buildings and the loss of life by extremist groups,” the presidency said.
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Via: NBC:
Egypt’s capital descended into a chaotic bloodbath Wednesday after security forces moved in on protest camps set up by supporters of ousted president Mohammed Morsi, sparking deadly violence.
A month-long nationwide state of emergency was declared as the interim government tried to maintain order.
At least 95 people were killed and 874 injured, the country’s health ministry said, as unrest spread to other parts of the country.
Witness reports and pro-Morsi volunteers in Cairo put the toll much higher, but the none of the higher figures could be immediately confirmed by NBC News.
Unverified pictures posted to social media showed dozens of bodies after tear gas and gunfire engulfed the protest camps at Rabaa and Nahda.
Saudi Prince Defects, Discusses Dictatorship
August 13th, 2013Via: Russia Today:
Saudi Arabia, a major supporter of opposition forces in Syria, has increased crackdown on its own dissenters, with 30,000 activists reportedly in jail. In an exclusive interview to RT a Saudi prince defector explained what the monarchy fears most.
“Saudi Arabia has stepped up arrests and trials of peaceful dissidents, and responded with force to demonstrations by citizens,” Human Rights Watch begins the country’s profile on its website.
Political parties are banned in Saudi Arabia and human rights groups willing to function legally have to go no further than investigating things like corruption or inadequate services. Campaigning for political freedoms is outlawed.
One of such groups, which failed to get its license from the government, the Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association (ACPRA), was cited by AFP as saying the kingdom was holding around 30,000 political prisoners.
Saudi Prince Khaled Bin Farhan Al-Saud, who spoke to RT from Dusseldorf, Germany, confirmed reports of increased prosecution of anti-government activists and said that it’s exactly what forced him to defect from his family. He accused the monarchy of corruption and silencing all voices of dissent and explained how the Saudi mechanism for suppression functioned.
“There is no independent judiciary, as both police and the prosecutor’s office are accountable to the Interior Ministry. This ministry’s officials investigate ‘crimes’ (they call them crimes), related to freedom of speech. So they fabricate evidence, don’t allow people to have attorneys”, the prince told RT Arabic. “Even if a court rules to release such a ‘criminal’, the Ministry of Interior keeps him in prison, even though there is a court order to release him. There have even been killings! Killings! And as for the external opposition, Saudi intelligence forces find these people abroad! There is no safety inside or outside the country.”
Research Credit: windhorse
