tytso

39 ms·

301.
by tytso 13y ago
> subverting the IETF is a little like subverting the Linux kernel --- doable, but bad tradecraft ... and what kind of tradecraft, pray tell, is subverting a random number generator and planting it inside the BSAFE library after paying o
302.
NSA review panel says nothing about subverting hardware products(plus.google.com)
2 points by tytso 13y ago|0 comments
303.
by tytso 13y ago
There are two ways things can be simple or complicated. One is to have a big button labelled "DWIM", which always does the right thing --- until it doesn't, and then you have to go out of your way to work around its assumpt
304.
by tytso 13y ago
There are some LED bulbs that are explicitly rated for use in enclosures with no ventilation. The other thing to pay attention to is whether the light dispersal pattern is pointed mostly straight down (i.e., for a recessed ceiling lightin
305.
by tytso 13y ago
After reading most of the comments, and having participated on more than a few git vs. <insert random DCVS> discussions, here are what I hope are some hopefully new contributions. All systems have different tradeoffs depending the tar
306.
by tytso 13y ago
This reminds me about people who are fanatical about avoiding nitrates in Bacon, not realizing that the "natural" celery salt added to Bacon means that actually the expensive bacon sold in Whole Foods actually has more nitrates th
307.
by tytso 13y ago
If people are modding their phone by loading a new kernel as well as the modified file system, they won't have a problem. So for people with unlocked bootloaders, this isn't a problem; and if a handset doesn't allow the boo
308.
by tytso 13y ago
The PDF written offer seems to request that you send e-mail to mobile@huawei.com. Have you tried sending a request to that e-mail? Note that the GPL does not require that the source code be made available on-line. If the binaries were di
309.
by tytso 13y ago
Think about what happens to the stock price of a company once it stops growing. It falls through the floor. It could be making enough money to pay all of its employees, and making the world a better place, but if it doesn't grow, th
310.
by tytso 13y ago
If files weren't completely deleted when the trash was emptied, then people would be kvetching about the horrible security implications and the only way to be sure was to keep files on the local disk so that when you emptied the trash,
311.
by tytso 13y ago
The Zumwalt is using Real-Time Java, using a JVM from IBM that has an incremental GC with real-time guarantees (unlike the real-time Java spec, which essentially works by disabling the GC for real-time threads, so their NonHeapRealTime thre
312.
by tytso 13y ago
It's true that many of the attacks (such as BEAST) rely on attacks related to the IV. However, look at underlying mechanism of that attack; it requires that the attacker be able to predict the entire IV (which it can do since it can u
313.
by tytso 13y ago
Why do you need so much random numbers such that /dev/urandom is too slow for you? There are plenty of uses of randomness. Let's look at some of them: 1. Monte Carlo Simulations 2. Wiping disk files that might contain sens
314.
by tytso 13y ago
Yes, I'm aware of the concept of forward secrecy, and the formalism around it. Without intending to sound snippy myself, I think there is a tendency for academicians (whose promotion/tenure prospects are directly related being a
315.
by tytso 13y ago
So I'm the maintainer for Linux's /dev/random driver. I've only had a chance to look at the paper very quickly, and I will at it more closely when I have more time, but what the authors of this paper seem to be wor
316.
by tytso 13y ago
I've always had really good customer service with T-mobile. I remember once time almost 5-10 years ago when I needed help getting the right AT commands to connect to GPRS using Linux. The help desk heard me use the appropriate techni
317.
by tytso 13y ago
There will always be pundits on both sides of these sorts of arguments. In the early 90's, there were lots of people predicting IBM's imminent break-up. In 2011, Tomi Ahonen was claiming that despite everyone claiming that Noki
318.
by tytso 13y ago
It's not necessarily a fraud. The key is it only works in cases where the fair market value of the house is below the value of the mortgage. In that case, the city only has to pay the FMV. Now, there is always going to be some qu
319.
by tytso 13y ago
Without diminishing the props that need to be given to the team at IBM Research which developed Watson, the author of this article has significantly overestimated the general AI capabilities of Watson, while downplaying what is involved wit
320.
by tytso 13y ago
>Great on Yahoo for putting a reward program in place, but when did everyone become so entitled to getting something for reporting a bug/security concern. For better or for worse, cyber criminals started paying black hats for exclus
321.
by tytso 13y ago
"In December 2011, researcher Stefan Viehböck reported a design and implementation flaw that makes brute-force attacks against PIN-based WPS feasible to perform on WPS-enabled Wi-Fi networks. A successful attack on WPS allows unauthori
322.
by tytso 13y ago
The author is worried about WiFi passwords? If you trust that your WiFi is secure in general, you're in trouble. WPS is horribly insecure, for example, and that's what most home users use. Most user-chosen passwords are incr
323.
by tytso 13y ago
I'm not convinced the XOR hack could be done in a way such that it wouldn't be noticed by someone inside Intel. But sure, we could do that. It would require calling RDRAND a new more times, but it's relatively cheap.
324.
by tytso 13y ago
Fair point. Although it's important to note that not any collision attack would work. The collision attack still had to meet certain properties before it could be used to successfully attack x509 certificates. So the ability to use
325.
by tytso 13y ago
More to the point, a change like this is very likely to be _noticed_. Both in terms of the complexity that would be required to make such a change in the microcode, and if the logic screws up and tampers with the wrong XOR, it will cause a
326.
by tytso 13y ago
I thought of this issue over a year ago. See: http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.g... https://plus.google.com/117091380454742934025/posts/SDcoemc9..
327.
by tytso 13y ago
This is a very old writeup (2007, revised 2009) and one of the things that it misses is the difference between pre-image resistance, second pre-image resistance, and collision resistance. Yes, if you are using a 64-bit hash, it only takes
328.
Jeff Schiller rebuts Gilmore's accusations re: IPSEC and the NSA(mail-archive.com)
6 points by tytso 13y ago|0 comments
329.
by tytso 13y ago
If you were to actually read the article, you'll note that the project began _before_ the Snowden revelations started coming out.
330.
by tytso 13y ago
The hard part is that the NSA has two missions --- cracking foreign crypto, and protecting US crypto. When an NSA employee speaks, we will have no idea whether he or she is speaking with the "protect US crypto" hat on, or the &q

More ›