Hasta La Gadget!

It seems like no matter how much companies may try to up their defenses, there will always be some industrious young hacker who manages to evade every roadblock in his way. One team of researchers, though, think they may have finally found a way to turn their defense into an attack on the hackers themselves—by spewing fake data at them and sending them drowning.

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Recent events in the US and elsewhere have given rise to renewed and more mainstream interest in cryptography. But while the more popular methods are slowly proving to be inadequate, … Continue reading

Back in October 2013, after a string of leaks by Edward Snowden pushed major internet companies to do more with regards to user privacy, Yahoo announced that it will add automatic encryption to Yahoo Mail by early 2014. This means that all emails will automatically be encrypted by the email service. The company has formally announced that it has delivered on its promise. It is now automatically encrypting all connections between its users and Yahoo Mail.

What this means is that anytime anyone uses Yahoo Mail, through web or mobile apps, IMAP, POP, SMTP or mobile web, it will be 100 percent encrypted by default with 2,048 bit certificates. Not only that, this encryption also extends to attachments, contacts, calendar and messenger apart from all emails in Yahoo Mail. The company says that security is a key focus for it and that it will continue to enhance its security technology. Yahoo not only pledged to encrypt its mail service, it also promised to encrypt all data flowing to and from its servers by April 2014. Its about time that Yahoo added this security feature to its email service, rivals Gmail and Outlook have offered it since 2010 and 2012 respectively. Not sure who it would protect you against the NSA though, it is allegedly capable of cracking almost all kinds of encryption.

Yahoo Mail Now Encrypts All Connections original content from Ubergizmo.

You will not be surprised to learn that the NSA is spending nearly $80 million trying to build "a cryptologically useful quantum computer." The Washington Post just published details of the program, codenamed "Penetrating Hard Targets," based on documents supplied by Edward Snowden.

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They say that a chain is as strong as its weakest link, and when it comes to cracking the encryption code of a computer, a bunch of researchers have made a rather startling discovery. What they did was to listen to the different sounds that a computer’s CPU made, before using that data in order to crack open the computer, which theoretically speaking, would allow even the world’s toughest encryption to be cracked wide open.

4096-bit RSA happens to be one of the most secure encryption algorithms worldwide, but researchers Daniel Genkin, Adi Shamir (co-creator of the algorithm itself) and Eran Tromer enlisted the help of a microphone in order to tune in to the sounds a computer’s CPU whenever it decrypts data. The sound is the result of the CPU regulating its voltage, with each sound emitted to represent a certain RSA key. Once you understand the RSA system of encryption, it is a simple matter of cracking the code in order to obtain full access to the data. RSA happens to be the only encryption method to be tested, and if it could be cracked, less secure methods would not be able to stand a chance either, using the same principle. Security and privacy issues, first world problems.

Researchers Listen To Computer CPU Sounds In Order To Crack Encryption Code original content from Ubergizmo.