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Hard Disk Encryption needs management…
This week CNET News contributor Jon Oltsik blogged about how he believes that now there’s a unified standard for hardware disk encryption, governments should lead the transition to self-encrypting hard disks. Jon makes the point that hardware encryption is simple, fast, and generally more secure than software encryption.
While it would be admirable to see any government protect their data, Jon in my opinion missed the big point: the benefit of the standard is really common key management between all the different vendors. No one really gets any benefit from the drives doing the encryption the same way – as long as it’s a “good” way, who cares? But, if all the drives have a common key management architecture, it makes the provisioning and, more importantly, the recovery of data much simpler. Read more…
Faking Face Recognition
This week CNET news reported on some interesting, new ways of bypassing facial recognition technology built into newer laptops. The reporter (Dong Ngo) published an interesting article which shows an easy way of bypassing the software from companies such as Lenovo, Toshiba and Asus that are shipped on popular laptops. By using a slightly modified picture of the correct recipient, one can easily fool the software. Read more…
Quantum Cryptography a reality?
BBC News recently reported that the world’s first robust network based on Quantum cryptography hasgone live in Vienna. Comprising 7 locations and 200km of optical fiber, and hosted by Siemens, the network has the capability to re-route connections in the event of link failure, and handle eavesdropping attacks.
Though it sounds a little Star Trek, Quantum Crypto has been around for over 20 years already – IBM patented the classic Quantum key exchange algorithm in 1984. It’s a novel concept because the key exchange algorithm (BB84) is provably secure – i.e., there’s no hack or attack for it unless our understanding of the nature of the Universe is fundamentally wrong. Read more…
Bitmap Discovery Exploits
It was announced back in October 2008 that Bernd Roellgen of PMC Ciphers has “discovered” a possible exploit which can be used to reveal details of the encryption key used to protect hard disk image backups. PMC used this information to promote the release of a new version of their software which is immune.
Some customers have asked me what I think about this, as it relates to McAfee products so I thought a blog would be a good place to start. Read more…
Who?
 | EVP Cyber Product Innovation for Mastercard. Formally the Chief Technology Officer for Intel Secure Home Gateways, CTO for McAfee Enterprise Endpoint, CTO McAfee Innovation team, and Founder/CTO SafeBoot Corp. |
Simon Says - Musings of a Technology CTO 
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