Global tech giants back encryption
FBI director James B. Comey has for some time been a critic of encryption technologies, arguing that challenges for his agency are growing as groups they are monitoring "go dark"…
Blogs
The UK's draft Investigatory Powers Bill
The United Kingdom's draft Investigatory Powers Bill is looking draconian. George Danezis from University College London has an excellent blog post detailing the most serious implications of the bill, particularly…
A safe harbour no longer
The United States is no longer regarded as a "safe harbour" for EU data - and that's big (and welcome) news for Europeans. In 1995, the European Union adopted the…
RC4: your time is up
RC4 is a widely used stream cipher - an encryption algorithm - designed by Ron Rivest in 1987 for RSA Security (now a division of EMC). In 1994 the source…
TalkTalk hack
Details of a damaging hack of British phone and broadband provider TalkTalk's customer database are emerging. Apparently, the credit card, bank details and account information of all of its 4…
Privacy: nothing to hide, still something to fear
Our previous post explained that the "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" argument is based on a narrow view of privacy that assumes it is primarily about concealing our wrongs. …
Privacy: nothing to hide, nothing to fear?
"I've got nothing to hide so I've got nothing to fear from [insert surveillance program here]" is a commonly heard retort to concerns about our diminishing ability to keep our…
SHA-1 now broken
SHA-1 is a hash algorithm that has been widely used in cryptography. Hash algorithms are mathematical functions that take a block of data of arbitrary size (called the message) as…
Software testing lessons from VW
In our last post, we discussed how VW managed to manipulate their vehicle emissions so they could pass the EPA standards, even though in normal use they emitted up to…
How did VW trick the EPA?
Over the last week we've learnt that VW perpetrated a massive fraud on the US Environmental Protection Agency, and on other government agencies world-wide. It seems that 11 million VW…