Thu 20 Sep 2007
Don Woolford (AAP), via Slashdot, reports:
KIM Beazley has told how Australia cracked top-secret American combat aircraft codes while he was defence minister in the 1980s.
“We spied on them and we extracted the codes,” Mr Beazley told Parliament during his valedictory speech today.
(more…)
Wed 6 Apr 2005
On Slashdot, xs3 writes:
At a recent ISSA (Information Systems Security Association) meeting in Los Angeles, a team of FBI agents demonstrated current WEP-cracking techniques and broke a 128 bit WEP key in about three minutes. Special Agent Geoff Bickers ran the Powerpoint presentation and explained the attack, while the other agents (who did not want to be named or photographed) did the dirty work of sniffing wireless traffic and breaking the WEP keys. This article will be a general overview of the procedures used by the FBI team.
Sun 30 Jan 2005
Steve Bono, Matthew Green, Adam Stubblefield, and Avi Rubin, Johns Hopkins University; Ari Juels and Michael Szydlo, RSA Laboratories write, via Slashdot:
The Texas Instruments DST tag is a cryptographically enabled RFID transponder used in several wide-scale systems including vehicle imobilizers and the ExxonMobil SpeedPass system. This page serves as an overview of our successful attacks on DST enabled systems. A preliminary version of the full academic paper describing our attacks in detail is also available [..].
(more…)
Fri 18 Jun 2004
Alice wants Bob to buy Pirates of the
Caribbean from her. Bob will only buy Pirates of the Caribbean if
he can descramble the CSS-encrypted VOB — video object — on his
DVD player. Otherwise, the disc is only useful to Bob as a
drinks-coaster. So Alice has to provide Bob — the attacker –
with the key, the cipher and the ciphertext.Hilarity ensues.
DRM systems are broken in minutes, sometimes days. Rarely,
months. It’s not because the people who think them up are stupid.
It’s not because the people who break them are smart. It’s not
because there’s a flaw in the algorithms. At the end of the day,
all DRM systems share a common vulnerability: they provide their
attackers with ciphertext, the cipher and the key. At this point,
the secret isn’t a secret anymore.
