• #security on software development security and web security, security best practices and discussions, break-ins and countermeasures. Everything you ever wanted to know about software security but were afraid to ask, for fear of not understanding the answer!

Cryptography: just do not!

Cryptography: just do not!

Software developers regularly attempt to create new encryption and hashing algorithms, usually to speed up things. There is only one answer one can give in this respect: Here is a short summary of reasons why you should never meddle in cryptography. Cryptography is mathematics, very advanced mathematics There are only a few good cryptographers and ...

Read More

Supply chain: Huawei and ZTE

US House of Representatives published an interesting report about their concerns with Huawei and ZTE, large Chinese telecom equipment providers. The report states openly that there are concerns that the equipment, parts and software may be manipulated by the Chinese government agencies, or on their behalf, in order to conduct military, state and business intelligence. ...

Read More

The Elderwood Report

Symantec reports very interesting findings in their report of the so-called “Elderwood Project”. A highly interesting paper that I can recommend as bedside reading. Here is a teaser: In 2009, Google was attacked by a group using the Hydraq (Aurora) Trojan horse. Symantec has monitored this group’s activities for the last three years as they ...

Read More

SHA-3 is there!

NIST has announced the end of the Secure Hash Algorithm competition the day before yesterday, naming Keccak as the winner and making it the SHA-3 algorithm. The complete announcement from NIST is here. One thing of note is that since the algorithm was developed by STMicroelectronics and NXP Semiconductors, the algorithm is heavily optimized for ...

Read More