Monthly Archives: January 2014

Substitute for:Measurements. 1 Episode. Strength of the encryption algorithm – Video

Posted on by


Substitute for:Measurements. 1 Episode. Strength of the encryption algorithm
not to be counted in Jan-Mar 2014 video plan In September we did set cash challenge with a prize 10 Lunaro == 2000$. Nobody did decryption of the message on ...

By: Alex Dobrianski

Go here to see the original:

Substitute for:Measurements. 1 Episode. Strength of the encryption algorithm - Video

Tennessee bill takes on NSA encryption-breaking facility at Oak Ridge/SHUT. IT. DOWN. – Video

Posted on by


Tennessee bill takes on NSA encryption-breaking facility at Oak Ridge/SHUT. IT. DOWN.
By RealWorldReport Tennessee bill takes on NSA encryption-breaking facility at Oak Ridge http://tenthamendmentcenter.com/2014/01/22/tennessee-nsa-bill-oak-ri...

By: RealWorldReport

Visit link:

Tennessee bill takes on NSA encryption-breaking facility at Oak Ridge/SHUT. IT. DOWN. - Video

From NSA to Gmail: Ex-spy launches free email encryption service

Posted on by

The surveillance bombshells revealed by Edward Snowden have prompted many Americans to reconsider what they say and do online.

Hoping to seize upon amplified privacy concerns, a former National Security Agency architect launched a free service this week that allows users to easily encrypt their Gmail, Yahoo (YHOO) and Outlook emails.

Virtru, which has received $4 million in angel financing, emerged from stealth mode on Tuesday and has already attracted interest from a number of potential corporate customers, including big Wall Street banks.

There is mass concern about privacy. The issue is people dont know where to go to take action. Were trying to meet that need, said John Ackerly, a former White House official who co-founded Virtru with his brother Will.

While working at the NSA, Will Ackerly helped invent an encryption format that has become the standard for sharing sensitive data between U.S. intelligence agencies. Seeing the great demand to protect personal and commercial documents, the Ackerly brothers are now deploying that platform to a much wider audience.

Services like Virtru will probably give most commercial users a degree of security that only governments have enjoyed to this point, said Cedric Leighton, a former NSA official who does not know the Ackerly brothers.

'Very Hard to Break'

Virtru appears to be launching at a perfect time given the enormous amount of attention on government surveillance, which classified documents leaked by Snowden show is far greater than the American public realized.

According to a poll of 2,000 U.S. adults by Harris Interactive that Virtru commissioned, 73% of Americans online are concerned about the privacy of their email communications. But just 34% of online adults said they had taken steps like using a secure email provider or encrypted technologies.

While the Snowden revelations caused the country tremendous harm in terms of national security, John Ackerly said the issues are real and the balance of power has shifted away from the individual.

See the article here:

From NSA to Gmail: Ex-spy launches free email encryption service

Eric Schmidt: Encryption will break through the Great Firewall of China

Posted on by

Summary: Google Chairman Eric Schmidt says the firm is intent on developing encryption services to "give people a voice" in strictly censored states.

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt says that the tech giant's encryption services could eventually open up countries with stringent censorship rules.

At the World Economic Forum at Davos, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, Schmidt said that countries including North Korea and China could be opened up within the next decade through encryption technologies.

"It is possible, within the next decade, using encryption, we would be able to open up countries that have strict censorship laws [..] giving people a voice," Schmidt said.

In China, YouTube access is totally out of the question, and Gmail is accessible sporadically. According to censorship monitor Greatfire's latest data, Facebook, Twitter, blogspot.com, netflix.com, bloomberg.com and liveleak.com are also currently unavailable in all Chinese provinces.

Hundreds of domains are banned by the Chinese government for a number of reasons. Websites are often blocked for violating Chinese laws on free speech, may contain "terrorist' content or pornographic material, and social networks are a target due to their user content sharing nature, which would be impossible for the government to control.

In the wake of rampant domain blocking by the Chinese government -- including a number of Google services -- as well as the surveillance scandal involving the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) thanks to disclosures by former contractor Edward Snowden, Schmidt says Google has been working to improve and strengthen its encryption. The tech giant hopes to eventually create protocols that governments won't be able to penetrate or spy upon.

"This creates a problem for governments like Chinas, Schmidt commented.

While the Google Chairman views the Chinese as equals in the realm of technology, he also blamed the country for most of the world's cyberespionage campaigns. In May, current and former U.S. officials said that when Chinese hackers broke in to Google servers in 2010, rather than seeking data concerning human rights activists, the attackers were actually looking for information relating to U.S. surveillance and law enforcement.

Schmidt added:

Excerpt from:

Eric Schmidt: Encryption will break through the Great Firewall of China

EnterpriseDB Expands in Korea to Meet Rising Demand for Postgres

Posted on by

BEDFORD, Massachusetts, January 23, 2014 /PRNewswire/ --

Sweeping government initiatives to adopt open source software alternatives are driving greater demand for Postgres software and expertise

EnterpriseDB(EDB), the leading worldwide provider of enterprise-class Postgres products andOracle database compatibilitysolutions, today announced its expansion in South Korea with the opening of a new branch office in Seoul. EnterpriseDB has appointed Jihoon (James) Kim as manager to provide local support to Korean governments and corporations adopting Postgres.

The use of open source software has expanded dramatically in Korea in recent years following government initiatives to adopt and develop solutions that utilize open source software to avoid proprietary lock-in. Under the stewardship of Korea's National IT Industry Promotion Agency and the National Computing & Information Agency (NCIA), government agencies are working to convert systems to open source to meet goals set by national initiatives. The NCIA is working to create benchmark deployments that help Korean government agencies achieve the government's goal of running 40 percent of its operations on open source software by 2016.

"Major initiatives in Korea to use open source software wherever possible have propelled Postgres to the forefront in the database sector. Postgres is gaining widespread recognition among global enterprises for its performance and stability," said Jihoon (James) Kim, Branch Manager at EnterpriseDB. "Organizations in Korea have been particularly aggressive given government initiatives and the nation's overall drive for innovation. We're expanding in Korea to ensure organizations have the resources they need to succeed with Postgres."

In the Korean corporate sector, the telecommunications industry has taken a leadership position in adopting open source based database solutions. KT Corporation, for example, is working on one of the largest enterprise database migrations from a proprietary vendor to EnterpriseDB's open source based Postgres Plus Advanced Server. KT Corp. has deployed Postgres to support multiple mission-critical applications with tremendous success and is currently identifying workloads across the enterprise that can be migrated from a costly traditional database to Postgres.

"We continue to be impressed by the performance of Postgres and we're actively seeking more opportunities to deploy the database," said Jungsook Jaegal, General Manager, IT Architecture team, IT Strategy and Planning BU, at KT. "We enjoy a rewarding partnership with EnterpriseDB in our efforts to deploy Postgres in place of more costly, traditional solutions based on proprietary technology."

Connect with EnterpriseDB

Read our blog:http://blogs.enterprisedb.com/

Follow us on Twitter:http://www.twitter.com/enterprisedb

Here is the original post:

EnterpriseDB Expands in Korea to Meet Rising Demand for Postgres

An Overview of Cryptography – Gary C. Kessler

Posted on by

Does increased security provide comfort to paranoid people? Or does security provide some very basic protections that we are naive to believe that we don't need? During this time when the Internet provides essential communication between tens of millions of people and is being increasingly used as a tool for commerce, security becomes a tremendously important issue to deal with.

There are many aspects to security and many applications, ranging from secure commerce and payments to private communications and protecting passwords. One essential aspect for secure communications is that of cryptography, which is the focus of this chapter. But it is important to note that while cryptography is necessary for secure communications, it is not by itself sufficient. The reader is advised, then, that the topics covered in this chapter only describe the first of many steps necessary for better security in any number of situations.

This paper has two major purposes. The first is to define some of the terms and concepts behind basic cryptographic methods, and to offer a way to compare the myriad cryptographic schemes in use today. The second is to provide some real examples of cryptography in use today.

I would like to say at the outset that this paper is very focused on terms, concepts, and schemes in current use and is not a treatise of the whole field. No mention is made here about pre-computerized crypto schemes, the difference between a substitution and transposition cipher, cryptanalysis, or other history. Interested readers should check out some of the books in the references section below for detailed and interesting! background information.

Cryptography is the science of writing in secret code and is an ancient art; the first documented use of cryptography in writing dates back to circa 1900 B.C. when an Egyptian scribe used non-standard hieroglyphs in an inscription. Some experts argue that cryptography appeared spontaneously sometime after writing was invented, with applications ranging from diplomatic missives to war-time battle plans. It is no surprise, then, that new forms of cryptography came soon after the widespread development of computer communications. In data and telecommunications, cryptography is necessary when communicating over any untrusted medium, which includes just about any network, particularly the Internet.

Within the context of any application-to-application communication, there are some specific security requirements, including:

Cryptography, then, not only protects data from theft or alteration, but can also be used for user authentication. There are, in general, three types of cryptographic schemes typically used to accomplish these goals: secret key (or symmetric) cryptography, public-key (or asymmetric) cryptography, and hash functions, each of which is described below. In all cases, the initial unencrypted data is referred to as plaintext. It is encrypted into ciphertext, which will in turn (usually) be decrypted into usable plaintext.

In many of the descriptions below, two communicating parties will be referred to as Alice and Bob; this is the common nomenclature in the crypto field and literature to make it easier to identify the communicating parties. If there is a third or fourth party to the communication, they will be referred to as Carol and Dave. Mallory is a malicious party, Eve is an eavesdropper, and Trent is a trusted third party.

There are several ways of classifying cryptographic algorithms. For purposes of this paper, they will be categorized based on the number of keys that are employed for encryption and decryption, and further defined by their application and use. The three types of algorithms that will be discussed are (Figure 1):

With secret key cryptography, a single key is used for both encryption and decryption. As shown in Figure 1A, the sender uses the key (or some set of rules) to encrypt the plaintext and sends the ciphertext to the receiver. The receiver applies the same key (or ruleset) to decrypt the message and recover the plaintext. Because a single key is used for both functions, secret key cryptography is also called symmetric encryption.

Excerpt from:

An Overview of Cryptography - Gary C. Kessler