NSA Utah Data Center Administration Building. Image courtesy of nsa.gov

If anyone had insisted a year ago that there was a giant government warehouse in Utah that was poring through every electronic communication sent from around the world, from text messages to emails to web traffic, they would be accused of having paranoid delusions. Now in 2014, though, its yesterdays news.

After former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked information on the United States security programs that are looking through each piece of data we transmit, thus pulling back the curtain on how much our privacy has truly been invaded, the world has changed as our eyes were opened. Encryption is becoming a very important topic in online news, and so is the underlying field, called cryptography.

As consumers living in a post-Edward Snowden world, we should remain aware of what cryptography applications are out there, and how we can utilize them to keep our information (and thus, ourselves) safer. This article is intended to discuss some of the more practical usages of cryptography in modern computing, including PGP/GPG encryption, encrypted chat programs such as Cryptocat, the anonymous Tor browser, and will touch on a major buzz item of 2013, Bitcoin.

All technologies written about in this article are currently (at the time of publishing) legal to use in the United States.

Some Common Cryptography Terms:

Cryptography: The study and practice of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversaries.

Adversary: A third party who may attempt to decipher an encrypted message. Hackers, rival companies, and identity thieves are all common adversaries in the cryptographic sense.

Encryption: The process of encoding messages or information in such a way that only authorized parties can read it.

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Cryptography Apps: How To Keep Your Personal Info Private

Summary: Facebook is open sourcing a new security tool intended to help developers write apps that are more secure and efficient on Android.

The term "conceal" might not be the most ideal moniker for a new tech and data-related product these days in the wake of the revelations about the National Security Agency.

That might even go double when the product is about cryptography.

Nevertheless, Conceal fits the bill as the title of Facebook's new set of Java APIs for enabling cryptography on Android.

Even though the world's largest social network is celebrating its 10th birthday this week (today, in fact), Facebook itself is handing out plenty of gifts. They range from a fancy new news reader app dubbed Paper to a tear-inducing personalized video reel chronicling Facebook users' shared moments over the last decade.

As a treat for mobile developers, Facebook is open sourcing a new security tool intended to help them write apps that are more secure and efficient on Android.

Subodh Iyengar, a software engineer at Facebook, explained in a blog post on Monday that these tools specifically target woes surrounding caching and storage.

He stressed that Conceal was designed as a smaller alternative to existing Java cryptography libraries in order to use memory more efficiently.

Conceal doesn't implement any crypto. Instead, it uses specific cryptographic algorithms from OpenSSL. OpenSSL's crypto library is about 1MB when built for armv7. By using only the parts of OpenSSL we needed, we were able to reduce the size of OpenSSL to 85KB. We believe providing a smaller library will reduce the friction of adopting state of the art encryption algorithms, make it easier to handle different Android platform versions, and enable us to quickly incorporate fixes for any security vulnerabilities in OpenSSL as well.

Facebook itself is using Conceal to store image files on SD cards, which the Menlo Park, Calif.-headquartered company asserted will help protect private user data through the encryption of data stored on these cards while moving other data around for faster processing.

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SPYING AGENCIES the US NSA and UK GCHQ have been accused of a hacking attack on a Belgian cryptography expert in one of the latest internet spying revelations.

Belgian newspaper De Standaard reported that professor Jean-Jacques Quisquater is the latest victim to be named in the scandal and that his personal computer fell victim to the spooks.

"A new Belgian episode in the NSA scandal: Belgian professor Jean-Jacques Quisquater, internationally renowned expert in data security was the victim of hacking," it reported.

"And, as was the case in the Belgacom hacking affair, there are indications the American secret service NSA and its British counterpart, the GCHQ might be involved."

The attack on the 67 year old Quisquater, who is a professor at the Universit Catholique de Louvain, was uncovered during the Belgacom hacking investigations. According to De Standaard, the professor has lodged a formal complaint.

The newspaper reported that both attacks used similar methods, and explained that the professor was lured into a trap through a socially engineered fake Linkedin message.

The message purported to come from the European patent office. Quisquater holds 17 patents dating back to 2007.

In an email to the Gigaom news website Quisquater confirmed that the police alerted him to the intrusion and that he was acting on its information.

"The Belgian federal police (FCCU) sent me a warning about this attack and did the analysis," he said, adding that the motive remains unknown.

"We don't know [why]. There are many hypotheses (about 12 or 15) but it is certainly an industrial espionage plus a surveillance of people working about civilian cryptography."

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12 hours ago Feb. 1, 2014 - 2:24 AM PST

Belgiums federal prosecutor is looking into the likely hacking of noted cryptographer Jean-Jacques Quisquater by the NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ, as first reported on Saturday morning by De Standaard.

Quisquaters targeting became apparent during the investigation into the hacking of telecoms firm Belgacom, shown by Edward Snowdens leaks to be the work of GCHQ.

As in that case, the Universit catholique de Louvain professor apparently fell victim to a quantum insert trick that duped him into thinking he was visiting LinkedIn to respond to an emailed request when he was actually visiting a malware-laden copy of a LinkedIn page.

The Belgian federal police (FCCU) sent me a warning about this attack and did the analysis, Quisquater told me by email. As for the purpose of the hack: We dont know. There are many hypotheses (about 12 or 15) but it is certainly an industrial espionage plus a surveillance of people working about civilian cryptography.

Quisquater, who holds 17 patents and is particularly noted for his work on payment security, also said the attack was related to a variant of MiniDuke, an exploit that quietly puts backdoors into the targets system.

Whatever the precise motive, on the face of it Quisquater is very much a civilian target a professor emeritus, not a spy, a terrorist nor a member of government. It would be difficult for any intelligence agency to claim that stealing information from him is a matter of crucial national interest. The aftermath of this revelation will be worth watching.

This article was updated at 9am PT to include Quisquaters quotes and again at 9.50am PT to include comment.

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NSA and GCHQ spoofed LinkedIn to hack Belgian cryptography professor

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