From Bruce Schneier’s “Burglars and “Feeling Secure” (Crypto-Gram: 15 January 2005):
This quote is from “Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief,” by Bill Mason (Villard, 2003): “Nothing works more in a thief’s favor than people feeling secure. That’s why places that are heavily alarmed and guarded can sometimes be the easiest targets. The single most important [...]
Posted on August 2nd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Webster U: infosec management, business, security, technology | Comments Off
From Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram Newsletter (15 August 2004):
Here’s an interesting hardware security vulnerability. Turns out that it’s possible to update the AMD K8 processor (Athlon64 or Opteron) microcode. And, get this, there’s no authentication check. So it’s possible that an attacker who has access to a machine can backdoor the CPU.
[See http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?action=detail&id=35446&threadid=35446&roomid=11]
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Posted on June 16th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, security, technology | Comments Off
From Nicholas Thompson’s “Who Needs Keys?” (Legal Affairs: November/December 2004):
The event was organized by 2600, a quarterly magazine whose name refers to one of the great discoveries in hacker history: that the plastic whistles given away free in boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal in the early 1970s could be slightly modified to create sound waves [...]
Posted on June 4th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, history, law, technology, writing ideas | Comments Off
From Michael Erard’s “The Strange Tale of Charlie Smoke” (Legal Affairs: November/December 2002):
… Social Insurance Number - the Canadian equivalent of a Social Security Number …
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Lots of good info about the FBI’s far-reaching wiretapping of US phone systems
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Posted on May 31st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: law, politics, writing ideas | Comments Off
From Bruce Schneier’s “Steganography: Truths and Fictions“:
Steganography is the science of hiding messages in messages. … In the computer world, it has come to mean hiding secret messages in graphics, pictures, movies, or sounds. …
The point of steganography is to hide the existence of the message, to hide the fact that the parties are communicating [...]
Posted on May 9th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Webster U: infosec management, fiction, non-fiction, security, writing ideas | Comments Off
From Edward Felten’s “Acoustic Snooping on Typed Information“:
Li Zhuang, Feng Zhou, and Doug Tygar have an interesting new paper showing that if you have an audio recording of somebody typing on an ordinary computer keyboard for fifteen minutes or so, you can figure out everything they typed. The idea is that different keys tend to [...]
Posted on April 2nd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: security, writing ideas | Comments Off
From Computerworld’s “Q&A: A lost interview with ENIAC co-inventor J. Presper Eckert“:
What’s the zaniest thing you did while developing ENIAC?
The mouse cage was pretty funny. We knew mice would eat the insulation off the wires, so we got samples of all the wires that were available and put them in a cage with a bunch [...]
Posted on February 15th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, fiction, technology | Comments Off
