digest-golf – Page 49

Lavabit held in contempt of court for printing crypto key in tiny font

Image by Rene Walter A federal appeals court on Wednesday upheld a contempt of court ruling against Ladar Levison and his now-defunct encrypted e-mail service provider, Lavabit LLC, for hindering the government’s investigation into the National Security Agency leaks surrounding Edward Snowden. In the summer of 2013, Lavabit was ordered to provide real-time e-mail monitoring of one particular user of the service, believed to be Snowden, the former NSA contractor turned whistleblower. Instead of adequately complying with the order to turn over the private SSL keys that protected his company’s tens of thousands of users from the government’s prying eyes, Levison chose instead to shut down Lavabit last year after weeks of stonewalling the government. However, Levison reluctantly turned over his encryption keys to the government, although not in a manner that the government deemed useful, and instead provided a lengthy printout with tiny type, a move the authorities said was objectionable. “The company had treated the court orders like contract negotiations rather than a legal requirement,” US Attorney Andrew Peterson, who represented the government, told PC World . Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

All sent and and received e-mails in Gmail will be analyzed, says Google

Google added a paragraph to its terms of service as of Monday to tell customers that, yes, it does scan e-mail content for advertising and customized search results, among other reasons. The change comes as Google undergoes a lawsuit over its e-mail scanning, with the plaintiffs complaining that Google violated their privacy. E-mail users brought the lawsuit against Google in 2013, alleging that the company was violating wiretapping laws by scanning the content of e-mails. The plaintiffs are varied in their complaints, but some of the cases include people who sent their e-mails to Gmail users from non-Gmail accounts and nonetheless had their content scanned. They argue that since they didn’t use Gmail, they didn’t consent to the scanning. US District Judge Lucy Koh refused Google’s motion to dismiss the case in September. Koh also denied the plaintiffs class-action status in March on the grounds that the ways that Google might have notified the various parties of its e-mail scanning are too varied, and she could not decide the case with a single judgment. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Fingerprint lock in Samsung Galaxy 5 easily defeated by whitehat hackers

SRLabs The heavily marketed fingerprint sensor in Samsung’s new Galaxy 5 smartphone has been defeated by whitehat hackers who were able to gain unfettered access to a PayPal account linked to the handset. The hack, by researchers at Germany’s Security Research Labs , is the latest to show the drawbacks of using fingerprints, iris scans, and other physical characteristics to authenticate an owner’s identity to a computing device. While advocates promote biometrics as a safer and easier alternative to passwords, that information is leaked every time a person shops, rides a bus, or eats at a restaurant, giving attackers plenty of opportunity to steal and reuse it. This new exploit comes seven months after a separate team of whitehat hackers bypassed Apple’s Touch ID fingerprint scanner less than 48 hours after it first became available. “We expected we’d be able to spoof the S5’s Finger Scanner, but I hoped it would at least be a challenge,” Ben Schlabs, a researcher at SRLabs, wrote in an e-mail to Ars. “The S5 Finger Scanner feature offers nothing new except—because of the way it is implemented in this Android device—slightly higher risk than that already posed by previous devices.” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Fingerprint lock in Samsung Galaxy 5 easily defeated by whitehat hackers

After Netflix pays Comcast, speeds improve 65%

Netflix’s decision to pay Comcast for a direct connection to the Comcast network has resulted in significantly better video streaming performance for customers of the nation’s largest broadband provider. Netflix has bemoaned the payment, asking the government to prevent Comcast from demanding such interconnection ” tolls .”But there’s little doubt the interconnection has benefited consumers in the short term. Average Netflix performance for Comcast subscribers rose from 1.51Mbps to 1.68Mbps from January to February, though the interconnection didn’t begin until late February. In data released today, Netflix said average performance on Comcast has now risen further to 2.5Mbps , a 65 percent increase since January. Comcast’s increased speed allowed it to pass Time Warner Cable, Verizon, CenturyLink, AT&T U-verse, and others in Netflix’s rankings. Comcast remains slower than Cablevision, Cox, Suddenlink, Charter, and Google Fiber. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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After Netflix pays Comcast, speeds improve 65%

FBI to have 52 million photos in its NGI face recognition database by next year

The EFF Jennifer Lynch is a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and works on open government, transparency and privacy issues, including drones, automatic license plate readers and facial recognition. New documents released by the FBI show that the Bureau is well on its way toward its goal of a fully operational face recognition database by this summer. The EFF received these records in response to our Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for information on Next Generation Identification (NGI) —the FBI’s massive biometric database that may hold records on as much as one-third of the US population. The facial recognition component of this database poses real threats to privacy for all Americans. Read 21 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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FBI to have 52 million photos in its NGI face recognition database by next year

Flowing salt water over graphene generates electricity

An image of graphene, showing defects in its single-atom thickness. UC Berkeley Hydroelectricity is one of the oldest techniques for generating electrical power, with over 150 countries using it as a source for renewable energy. Hydroelectric generators only work efficiently at large scales, though—scales large enough to interrupt river flow and possibly harm local ecosystems. And getting this sort of generation down to where it can power small devices isn’t realistic. In recent years, scientists have investigated generating electrical power using nano-structures. In particular, they have looked at generating electricity when ionic fluids—a liquid with charged ions in it—are pushed through a system with a pressure gradient. However, the ability to harvest the generated electricity has been limited because it requires a pressure gradient to drive ionic fluid through a small tube. But scientists have now found that dragging small droplets of salt water on strips of graphene generates electricity without the need for pressure gradients. In their study, published in Nature Nanotechnology , researchers from China grew a layer of graphene and placed a droplet of salt water on it. They then dragged the droplet across the graphene layer at different velocities and found that the process generated a small voltage difference. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Flowing salt water over graphene generates electricity

NSA used Heartbleed nearly from the start, report claims [Updated]

Citing two anonymous sources “familiar with the matter,” Bloomberg News reports that the National Security Agency has known about Heartbleed, the security flaw in the OpenSSL encryption software used by a majority of websites and a multitude of other pieces of Internet infrastructure, for nearly the entire lifetime of the bug—“at least two years.” The sources told Bloomberg that the NSA regularly used the flaw to collect intelligence information, including obtaining usernames and passwords from targeted sites. As Ars reported on April 9, there have been suspicions that the Heartbleed bug had been exploited prior to the disclosure of the vulnerability on April 5 . A packet capture provided to Ars by Terrence Koeman , a developer based in the Netherlands, shows malformed Transport Security Layer (TSL) Heartbeat requests that bear the hallmarks of a Heartbleed exploit. Koeman said the capture dates to November of last year. But if the NSA has been exploiting Heartbleed for “at least two years,” the agency would have needed to discover it not long after the code for the TLS Heartbeat Extension was added to OpenSSL 1.0.1, which was released on March 14, 2012. The first “beta” source code wasn’t available until January 3, 2012 . Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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NSA used Heartbleed nearly from the start, report claims [Updated]

Appeals court reverses hacker/troll “weev” conviction and sentence [Updated]

Self-portrait by Weev A federal appeals court Friday reversed and vacated the conviction and sentence of hacker and Internet troll Andrew “weev” Auernheimer. The case against Auernheimer, who has often been in solitary confinement for obtaining and disclosing personal data of about 140,000 iPad owners from a publicly available AT&T website, was seen as a test case on how far the authorities could go under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the same law that federal prosecutors were invoking against Aaron Swartz. But, in the end, the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals didn’t squarely address the controversial fraud law and instead said Aeurnheimer was charged in the wrong federal court. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Appeals court reverses hacker/troll “weev” conviction and sentence [Updated]

Whitehat hacker goes too far, gets raided by FBI, tells all

A whitehat hacker from the Baltimore suburbs went too far in his effort to drive home a point about a security vulnerability he reported to a client. Now he’s unemployed and telling all on reddit . David Helkowski was working for Canton Group, a Baltimore-based software consulting firm on a project for the University of Maryland (UMD), when he claims he found malware on the university’s servers that could be used to gain access to personal data of students and faculty. But he says his employer and the university failed to take action on the report, and the vulnerability remained in place even after a data breach exposed more than 300,000 students’ and former students’ Social Security numbers. As Helkowski said to a co-worker in Steam chat, “I got tired of being ignored, so I forced their hand.” He penetrated the university’s network from home, working over multiple VPNs, and downloaded the personal data of members of the university’s security task force. He then posted the data to Pastebin and e-mailed the members of the task force anonymously on March 15. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Heartbleed vulnerability may have been exploited months before patch

guthrieinator There’s good news, bad news, and worse news regarding the “Heartbleed” bug that affected nearly two-thirds of the Internet’s servers dependent on SSL encryption. The good news is that many of those servers (well, about a third) have already been patched. And according to analysis by Robert Graham of Errata Security, the bug won’t expose the private encryption key for servers “in most software” (though others have said several web server distributions are vulnerable to giving up the key under certain circumstances.) The bad news is that about 600,000 servers are still vulnerable to attacks exploiting the bug. The worse news is that malicious “bot” software may have been attacking servers with the vulnerability for some time—in at least one case, traces of the attack have been found in audit logs dating back to last November. Attacks based on the exploit could date back even further. Security expert Bruce Schneier calls Heartbleed a catastrophic vulnerability. “On the scale of 1 to 10, this is an 11,” he said in a blog post today. The bug affects how OpenSSL, the most widely used cryptographic library for Apache and nginx Web servers, handles a service of Transport Layer Security called Heartbeat—an extension added to TLS in 2012. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Heartbleed vulnerability may have been exploited months before patch

Ken May

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