CryptoHarlem, Teaching Encryption →
'“You can’t buy a bag of chips in Harlem without being surveilled,” Mitchell said. CryptoHarlem has been teaching the community how to use encryption and other methods to prevent their digital activities from being surveilled and used against them. “People say this is the next frontier of civil rights,” Mitchell said.' from the Motherboard post via YouTube
National Security Agency Research Directorate's 6th Annual Scientific Cybersecurity Paper Competition →
The National Security Agency's 6th Annual Scientific Cybersecurity Paper Competition has been announced, along with the following Distinguished Experts and other Pertinent Particulars of the Competition (eg., the submittal criteria et cetera). Interested? Read On... A superlative conclave of security luminaries will examine the nominations and provide their specific submittal preferences to the National Security Agency's Research Directorate.
- PROF. L. JEAN CAMP, Indiana University
- DR. ROBERT CUNNINGHAM, Lincoln Laboratory
- DR. WHITFIELD DIFFIE, Cybersecurity Advisor
- DR. DAN GEER, In-Q-Tel
- DR. JOHN MCLEAN, Naval Research Laboratory
- PROF. STEFAN SAVAGE, University of California, San Diego
- MR. PHIL VENABLES, Goldman Sachs
- PROF. DAVID WAGNER, University California at Berkeley
- DR. JEANNETTE WING, Columbia University
Here are the all-important dates:
- Submission Period Begins: December 15, 2017
- Submission Period for Entries Ends: March 30, 2018 11:59 PM, EST.
- Evaluation Process for Entries Begins: April 2, 2018
- Winners Notified: By September 14, 2018
- Winners Announced: Fall 2018
Mother's Security
via Norse Security's Glen Norman (also from Hacker High School), comes this interesting opinion piece on the difficulty of security implementations at the desktop... Today's Must Read!
Anti-Forensics and Actionable Evidence →
News, brought to my attention by Steve Hailey, CEO of the Cybersecurity Institute, is todays MustRead, focusing on Anti-Forensics. Examine, if you will, the affect anti-forensics has on investigatory professionals when performing examinations targeting computational systems. If you read anything today regarding forensics, read Steve's posting on LinkedIn, and the paper published by the three University of Washington researchers responsible for this superlative effort. Namely, Justin Brecese MSIM , Aaron Alva MISM and Casey Rodgers MISM. You may also download the documents from the CyberSecurity Insitute here in a compressed file, or from UW's Capstone Archives.
Physical Access Not Required →
Physikalisch Zugriff Nicht Erforderlich
More interesting security slap and tickle at the Chaos Computer Club confab in Germany... This time, apparently the lack of physical access was not an impediment in the second well publicized defeat of Apple Inc.'s [NasdaqGS: AAPL] TouchID. Jan Krissler, holding forth at the conference has detailed the steps taken to overcome the vaunted security of TouchID via a presentation entitled 'Gefahren von Kameras für (biometrische) Authentifizierungsverfahren [31c3] '.
'Krissler said he used commercially available software called VeriFinger to pull off the feat. The main source was a close-up picture of von der Leyen’s thumb, obtained during a news conference in October, along with photographs taken from different angles to get an image of the complete fingerprint.' - via Emil Protalinski writing at VentureBeat