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EFF Sues for Court Orders Requiring Tech Cos to Decrypt Users’ Communications
San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a Freedom of Information (FOIA) lawsuit today against the Justice Department to shed light on whether the government has ever used secret court orders to force technology companies to decrypt their customers’ private communications, a...
Keeping secrecy the exception, not the rule
This morning we filed a new lawsuit in federal court against the United States government to stand up for what we believe are our customers’ constitutional and fundamental rights – rights that help protect privacy and promote free expression. This is not a decision we made lightly, and hence we wanted to share…
Gone in Six Characters: Short URLs Considered Harmful for Cloud Services
[This is a guest post by Vitaly Shmatikov, professor at Cornell Tech and once upon a time my adviser at the University of Texas at Austin. — Arvind Narayanan.] TL;DR: short URLs produced by bit.ly, goo.gl, and similar services are so short that they can be scanned by brute force. Our scan discovered a large […]
Understanding the ginormous Philippines data breach
Remember when OPM got breached last year [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management_data_breach]? There was a lot of excitement in various parts of the world (namely the US) because here we had a government department (Office of Personnel Management), and they’d just lost 21.
CCTV Cameras Sold on Amazon Come with Pre-Installed Malware
I needed a simple set of good outdoor surveillance cameras for a friends home. Like everything else I buy, I turned to Amazon. I found (what seemed like) a great deal for a set of 6 poe cameras and...
Leaving Beta, New Sponsors
Let’s Encrypt is leaving beta today. We’re also excited to announce that founding sponsors Cisco and Akamai have renewed their Platinum sponsorships with 3-year commitments, Gemalto is joining as our newest Gold sponsor, and HP Enterprise, Fastly, Duda and ReliableSite.net are our newest Silver sponsors. Since our…
Pwncloud – Bad crypto in the Owncloud encryption module
This blog is written by Hanno Böck. Unless noted otherwise, its content is licensed as CC0 .
The 3DS Cryptosystem
I think one of the biggest challenge for system engineers is designing security. Recently, at the 32c3 conference, plutoo, derrek, and smea presented a series of hacks that completely defeated the security of the 3DS. As a result, people have implemented boot-time unsigned code execution (called “arm9loaderhax” in the…
WhatsApp Rolls Out End-To-End Encryption to Its Over 1B Users
End-to-end encryption has just gone massively mainstream. In an update on March 31st, the Facebook-owned messaging platform WhatsApp quietly pushed an update adding end-to-end encryption enabled by default to its chat and call functionality. They announced the change publicly on Tuesday, allowing...
I would like Debian to stop shipping XScreenSaver
If any of you reading this have decision-making ability along those lines, I would appreciate your assistance in making this happen. If you're wondering why: they are still shipping a version of my software that I released in 2014. Since that's roughly a decade in software years, it recently began popping up a single…
Signal Desktop beta now publicly available
For the past few months, the Signal Desktop beta has been available through an invitation program. We’ve gotten a lot of feedback, made a lot of improvements, and are now ready to open the beta up for public access.
RubyGems.org gem replacement security vulnerability and mitigation
Summary RubyGems.org contained a bug that could allow an attacker to replace some .gem files on our servers with a different file that they supplied. We deployed a partial fix on April 2nd and a co...
How Candy Japan got credit card fraud somewhat under control
Credit card fraud can be a huge problem for subscription boxes. Here's how we got our situation under control.
WhatsApp's Signal Protocol integration is now complete
At Open Whisper Systems, our goal is to make private communication simple. A year ago, we announced a partnership with WhatsApp and committed to integrating the Signal Protocol into their product, moving towards full end-to-end encryption for all of their users by default. Over the past year, we...
Bitcoin Users Reveal More Private Information Than They Realize
Most people think bitcoin is anonymous. In fact, new technologies trace BTC transactions, attempting to identify bitcoin users.
How Safe Browsing Works in Firefox
Firefox has had support for Google's Safe Browsing since 2005 when it started as a stand-alone Firefox extension . At first it was only available in the USA, but it was opened up to the rest of the world in 2006 and moved to the Google Toolbar . It then got integrated directly into Firefox 2.0 before the public launch…
The Trouble with CloudFlare
Wednesday, CloudFlare blogged that 94% of the requests it sees from Tor are "malicious." We find...
Amnesty International: Encryption Is a Human Rights Issue
New Report Analyzes How Crypto Backdoors, Interference with Crypto, and Compelled Disclosure of Encryption Keys All Impact Free Expression and Privacy Defending encryption is a human rights issue, according to a new Amnesty International report. The report calls on nation-states to promote the use...
Reproducible Signal builds for Android
As of our latest Android release, Signal builds are reproducible. Reproducible builds help to verify that the source code in our GitHub repository is the exact source code used to build the compiled Signal APK being distributed through Google Play.
Let's Encrypt and Nginx – State of the art secure web deployment
An overview of a secure web deployment with Let's Encrypt and Nginx. How to set up a valid HTTPS connection, harden it and get top security ratings.