Schneier on Security
A blog covering security and security technology.
Updated: 47 weeks 1 day ago
Video Interview with Me
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FBI and the Future of Wiretapping
Last month I posted Susan Landau's testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security on government eavesdropping. In fairness to the other side, here's testimony of Valerie Caproni, General Counsel of the FBI....
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Full Body Scanners
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Malware as Job Security
A programmer installed malware into the Whack-a-Mole arcade game as a form of job security. It didn't work....
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Criminals Stealing Cars by Calling Tow Trucks
It's a clever hack, but an old problem: the authentication in these sorts of normal operations isn't good enough to prevent abuse....
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Recently Declassified NSA History Document
"American Cryptography During the Cold War 1945-1989; Book IV: Cryptologic Rebirth 1981-1989." Document was first declassified in 2009. Here are some newly declassified pages....
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Interesting Research in Using Animals to Detect Substances
Fascinating research summarized in The Economist. Basically, detecting dogs respond to unconscious cues from their handlers, and generate false alarms because of them. It makes sense, as dogs are so attuned to humans. I'll bet bomb-sniffing bees don't make the same mistakes....
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Pickpockets are a Dying Breed
Pickpockets in America are dying out. This is the bit I found interesting: And perhaps most important, the centuries-old apprenticeship system underpinning organized pickpocketing has been disrupted. Pickpocketing has always perpetuated itself by having older hooks -- nicknamed "Fagins," after the crime boss in Oliver Twist -- teach younger ones the art, and then absorbing them into canons. But due...
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NIST SHA-3 News
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Erasing Data from Flash Drives
"Reliably Erasing Data From Flash-Based Solid State Drives," by Michael Wei, Laura M. Grupp, Frederick E. Spada, and Steven Swanson. Abstract: Reliably erasing data from storage media (sanitizing the media) is a critical component of secure data management. While sanitizing entire disks and individual files is well-understood for hard drives, flash-based solid state disks have a very different internal architecture,...
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Anonymous vs HBGary
One of the effects of writing a book is that I don't have the time to devote to other writing. So while I've been wanting to write about Anonymous vs HBGary, I don't think I will have time. Here's an excellent series of posts on the topic from ArsTechnica. In cyberspace, the balance of power is on the side of...
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