Tag Archive for: Cryptographers

RSA: Elite cryptographers scoff at idea that law enforcement can ‘overcome’ encryption

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U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ call for a way to “overcome” cryptography met with scorn from a panel of elite cryptographers speaking at this week’s RSA Conference 2017 in San Francisco.

“Any one of my students will be capable of writing good crypto code,” says Adi Shamir, the ‘S’ in RSA and a professor at the Weizmann Institute in Israel.

Sessions’ use of the term “overcome” during his confirmation hearings actually means installing backdoors, says Ronald Rivest, the ‘R’ in RSA and a professor at MIT. He cited a joint Congressional study that concluded that weakening encryption works against the national interest, and that encryption is global anyway — so the U.S. can’t call all the shots.

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Network World Tim Greene

World’s top cryptographers on encryption backdoors: No way

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Backdoors to break into encrypted communications are a bad idea from a confidentiality point of view, but Congress needs to act to decide how to balance that with the needs of law enforcement to catch terrorists and major criminals, some of the world’s top cryptographers told the RSA Conference 2016.

“The question is, where do you put the line?” says Adi Shamir, the “S” in RSA and a professor at Weizmann Institute of Technology.

The discussion came during the annual Cryptographer’s Panel at the conference during which the group discussed Apple’s fighting of a court order to remove security features from an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino terrorists.

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Network World Tim Greene

Cryptographers Fight FBI on Mobile Security – Wall Street Journal (blog)

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Wall Street Journal (blog)

Cryptographers Fight FBI on Mobile Security
Wall Street Journal (blog)
The U.S. government just lost highly classified security-clearance data to foreign hackers. Do Americans really want to trust Washington with the keys to their text messages? That's the question asked by Internet-security pioneers in a 33-page white …
FBI Director to Silicon Valley: 'Try Harder' to Find 'Going Dark' SolutionThreatpost
FBI chief Comey warns that terrorists hide behind encrypted communicationsComputerworld

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“mobile security” – read more

With ransomware on the rise, cryptographers take it personally

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Some of the world’s leading cryptographers are concerned about the increasing number of malicious programs that hold computers and mobile phones to ransom, in many cases by abusing the encryption algorithms they designed.

Despite law enforcement efforts to disrupt ransomware operations, the prevalence of such programs continued to grow last year, according to a report published Thursday by antivirus vendor F-Secure.

A family of ransomware programs known as Browlock, which impersonates police agencies and asks users to pay fictitious fines in order to regain control of their computers, was one of the top 10 PC threats during the second half of 2014, according to F-Secure’s statistics. An increase was also observed among the ransomware threats for Android phones.

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Network World Security