Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) revealed allegations on Monday that President Donald Trumps national security adviser, Michael Flynn, may have tried to hide his unofficial discussions with Russia by using encryption technology.

Speaking to CNNs Wolf Blitzer, Schiff explained that the Trump administration was not labeling allegations against Flynn as fake news because U.S. intelligence agencies may have audio recordings of him speaking to Russian officials while President Barack Obama was still in office.

They know that if there is a transcript, if there are recordings, that cant be dismissed, Schiff said. The fact that they would mislead the country about this is inexplicable.

What I think is interesting here, there are allegations again, as yet unproven that they may have also used encrypted communications, he added. Since Flynn was talking with the Russians, if he was using encrypted communications, it wasnt to conceal it from the Russians. Then you have to ask, who were they concealing conversations from?

According to Schiff, the allegations suggest that Flynn engaged in encrypted communications in addition to the un-encrypted discussions that were reportedly recorded by U.S. intelligence agencies.

This is something that I think we need to determine as part of an investigation, he said. But if there were then the question is, why were those being used? Who were those conversations to be concealed from, why was it necessary to go to that if you were simply talking about Christmas greetings as Sean Spicer apparently misrepresented to the country?

Watch the video below from CNN, broadcast Feb. 13, 2017.

Originally posted here:
Adam Schiff drops bombshell: Michael Flynn may have used encryption to hide Russia talks from US - Raw Story

Data protection startup Rubrik will add support for physical Windows servers, software-based encryption and customized reporting in the next version of its Cloud Data Management platform.

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Version 3.1 of Rubrik's Cloud Data Management platform will mark the seventh product upgrade since the Palo Alto, Calif., company started shipping products in 2015. The Rubrik software is due to ship before the end of March.

Rubrik's Cloud Data Management combines backup, recovery, replication, Google-like search, analytics, archival and copy data management. The Rubrik software can run on premises, in a commodity hardware appliance that the vendor sells with flash and hard disk drives, and in clouds such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. Last year, Rubrik also began making available a software-only version designed for remote and branch offices.

One of the main new features in the upcoming 3.1 release is the extension of support to physical Windows servers. Rubrik added support for physical Microsoft SQL servers and physical Linux servers in the 3.0 product release that became generally available in November.

Rubrik founder and CTO Arvind Nithrakashyap said prior versions focused primarily on VMware virtualized workloads. But, as the product gained wider adoption, enterprise customers wanted the Rubrik software to protect data running on physical servers as well, he said. Future releases will add support for additional platforms based on customer demand, according to Nithrakashyap.

Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP, a law firm with offices in Montreal, Toronto and New York, became a Rubrik customer in November. Evans Vogas, a Montreal-based network operations analyst at the firm, said 97% of the company's workloads run on VMware virtual servers. But, the company still uses legacy Windows servers in production and needs to back them up.

Vogas said the firm uses Commvault backup software to protect the physical Windows boxes, but he looks forward to the day when he can back up all of his virtual and physical servers from the same Rubrik console. He said he encountered problems in the past with software vendors blaming hardware vendors for problems, or vice versa.

"There's no finger-pointing anymore. It's one box, one throat to choke, one number to call. It's their software running on their appliance," Vogas said.

Another important new feature for Vogas is software-based encryption. The law firm's cloud-based archival data is already encrypted, but the in-house data is not. Prior to the 3.1 release, Rubrik previously offered hardware-based, Federal Information Processing Standard 140-2-certified encryption through self-encrypting drives. Vogas said he asked for software-based encryption before buying a Rubrik appliance, and the vendor assured him it would add that feature.

Vogas said software-based encryption will save the law firm a significant amount of money, because hardware-based encryption requires special servers and more expensive storage drives.

"If I had $7 million to spend, I'd probably prefer everything be hardware-based encryption, because it's very hard to break," Vogas said. "But software-based encryption accomplishes the encryption requirement. For myself, this will be sufficient."

Rubrik's Nithrakashyap said another capability many enterprise customers require is rich, customized reports to manage capacity, track data protection tasks, and comply with service-level agreements for backups and archives.

Rubrik previously included a set of reports with the product. But Nithrakashyap said the new Rubrik Envision feature, due in the 3.1 release, will allow enterprises to create customized reports. Envision can also deliver HTML5-based reports via email, he said.

The fast rise of the company's revenue and ability to get into large enterprises early on has been impressive. Dave Russellvice president and distinguished analyst of storage technologies, Gartner

The Rubrik Cloud Data Management 3.1 update will be free to all existing customers, according to Nithrakashyap. Rubrik claims it is approaching an annual bookings run rate of $100 million, with a customer growth rate of seven times in 2016.

"The fast rise of the company's revenue and ability to get into large enterprises early on has been impressive," Dave Russell, a Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst of storage technologies, wrote in an email. "This year will be very telling. Can Rubrik maintain, or even increase, the same level of growth and expanded deployment? That will be very interesting to watch."

Russell said he sees Rubrik going up against Veritas NetBackup, the Dell EMC Data Protection Suite -- Avamar or NetWorker -- with Data Domain, and Commvault. He added that startup Cohesity is generating market buzz as well.

"Rubrik's ease of deployment and management, scale-out architecture and overall cost structure are the reasons I see customers interested in Rubrik, and this release should help sustain that -- not that any of those other vendors are standing still by any means," Russell wrote.

Phil Goodwin, a storage systems and software research director at IDC, said Rubrik's market share remains small. He said even Veeam, ranked higher at fifth in the market, has a single-digit market share in the range of 4% to 5%.

"A lot of [Rubrik's] capabilities are wrapped around the ability to fundamentally integrate with the cloud," Goodwin said. "If you look at the way most typical products are architected, they have an on-premise solution, and they add cloud into it. Rubrik has really been designed from the ground up to include a cloud-based component to their solution."

Goodwin said he views the Rubrik software update as a significant one. He said the Windows Server support is important because enterprises virtualize only about 75% of their workloads and still run roughly a quarter on dedicated physical servers. He said encryption has become a must-have for most organizations, and Rubrik Envision represents a key expansion into data management, a trend that IDC has noted.

New options for backup and recovery planning

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See the article here:
Rubrik software adds Windows Server support, encryption - TechTarget

The Christian Science Monitor has posted an interesting article detailing some (but certainly not all) of the ways the US Secret Service can obtain data from locked phones. In all the cases discussed in the article, the data itself wasn't encrypted, but was otherwise inaccessible without the password.

In addition to using third-party forensic software and hardware (like that of recently-hacked Cellebrite), the Secret Service also engages in a lot of manual labor to recover phone data. In one instance, the Secret Service was able to pull out the phone's flash memory and grab data from it -- although this process took it nearly a week.

A Huawei phone obtained by the agency called for a very unique brute force approach.

In another case, involving a password-locked Huawei H883G phone, agents bought multiple copies of the same model and practiced carefully polishing off material from the back of the device with an automated sander.

Often, agents can apply heat to phones to open them up. But Huawei built this particular model in a way that applying too much heat could damage its memory. So, agents sanded off material from the back of the Huawei H883G device to excise sexually explicit images for a case involving a different New Hampshire man.

What's not contained in the article are complaints about encryption. Either the Secret Service doesn't encounter that much of it, or it just doesn't find it to be that much of an obstacle when it does. Dave Aitel, a former NSA research scientist, is the only person quoted in the article who says anything about encryption -- and even he believes the Secret Service's combination of hardware and software is a better approach than giving government agencies encryption backdoors.

Watering down encryption on phones is "not a good path," says Dave Aitel, a former National Security Agency research scientist who currently runs the cybersecurity firm Immunity. "The path of hacking is much nicer from a policy perspective."

[...]

"If a device is using encryption at rest ... that could be problematic, especially if the implementation of the encryption is good, he said.

It could be problematic, but encryption keeps bad guys out the same way it keeps the good guys out. And there's nothing covered here that suggests the Secret Service is as opposed to encryption as FBI Director James Comey is. Granted, the Secret Service probably runs into fewer encrypted phones than the FBI does, but even in its more-limited selection, it seems to be making the progress it needs without suggesting the government force companies to give them all-access backdoor keys.

One other somewhat surprising revelation contained in the piece is the fact that small phone manufacturers might (inadvertently) be making more secure phones than the Apples and Samsungs of the world. Why? Because the limited market draws less interest from government contractors who develop cell phone-cracking tools. If there are fewer government buyers interested in cracking Brand X, no company is going to expend research resources trying to find a way around the phone's built-in protections.

"A cheaper phone that might be less popular, it seems like it'd be easier for the vendors to get into it," says [James] Darnell of the Secret Service phone lab. "But it's actually quite the opposite."

What's covered here indicates James Comey's "sky is falling darkening" proclamations are pretty much his alone. Law enforcement at large isn't demanding encryption backdoors. It's just the same handful of holdouts, albeit ones with inordinately-large soapboxes.

See the original post:
US Secret Service Prefers Belt Sanders And Third-Party Vendors To Cell Phone Encryption Backdoors - Techdirt