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In the year 2014, we came to know about the NSA's ability to break Trillions of encrypted connections by exploiting common implementations of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm – thanks to classified documents leaked by ex-NSA employee Edward Snowden. At that time, computer scientists and senior cryptographers had presented the most plausible theory: Only a few prime numbers were commonly used by 92 percent of the top 1 Million Alexa HTTPS domains that might have fit well within the NSA's $11 Billion-per-year budget dedicated to "groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities." And now, researchers from University of Pennsylvania, INRIA, CNRS and Université de Lorraine have practically proved how the NSA broke the most widespread encryption used on the Internet. Diffie-Hellman key exchange (DHE) algorithm is a standard means of exchanging cryptographic keys over untrusted channels, which allows protocols such as HTTPS, SSH, VPN, SMTPS and IPsec to negotia...

The OpenSSL Foundation has released the promised patch for a high severity vulnerability in its cryptographic code library that let attackers obtain the key to decrypt HTTPS-based communications and other Transport layer security (TLS) channels. OpenSSL is an open-source library that is the most widely used in applications for secure data transfers. Most websites use it to enable Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption. However, after serious security vulnerabilities were discovered in OpenSSL over the last few years, the crypto library has been under much investigation by security researchers. The latest bugs affect OpenSSL versions 1.0.1 and 1.0.2, which has been patched in new releases of OpenSSL, versions 1.0.1r and 1.0.2f . The team has patched two separate vulnerabilities in OpenSSL. The " high severity " bug, identified as CVE-2016-0701 , addresses issues in the implementations of the Diffie-Hellman key exchang...

Yes, it seems like the mystery has been solved. We are aware of the United States National Security Agency (NSA) powers to break almost unbreakable encryption used on the Internet and intercept nearly Trillions of Internet connections – thanks to the revelations made by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013. However, what we are not aware of is exactly how did the NSA apparently intercept VPN connections, and decrypt SSH and HTTPS, allowing the agency to read hundreds of Millions of personal, private emails from persons around the globe. Also Read:  Top Best Password Managers . Now, computer scientists Alex Halderman and Nadia Heninger have presented a paper at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security that advances the most plausible theory as to how the NSA broke some of the most widespread encryption used on the Internet. According to the paper, the NSA has exploited common implementations of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm – a co...

And the Winners of this year's Turing Award are: Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman . The former chief security officer at Sun Microsystems Whitfield Diffie and the professor at Stanford University Martin E. Hellman won the 2015 ACM Turing Award, which is frequently described as the "Nobel Prize of Computing" . Turing Award named after  Alan M. Turing , the British mathematician and computer scientist who was a key contributor to the Allied cryptanalysis of the German Enigma cipher and the German "Tunny" encoding machine in World War II. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) announced the Turing Award the same day when FBI Director  James Comey  appeared before a congressional committee to discuss how  encryption has become Threat  to law enforcement. The ACM  announced the award on Tuesday, which includes the top prize of $1 Million that has been awarded to two men who invented the "public-key cryptography" – a technique that ...

After HeartBleed , POODLE and FREAK  encryption flaws, a new encryption attack has been emerged over the Internet that allows attackers to read and modify the sensitive data passing through encrypted connections, potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of HTTPS-protected sites, mail servers, and other widely used Internet services. A team of security researchers has discovered a new attack, dubbed Logjam , that allows a man-in-the-middle (MitM) to downgrade encrypted connections between a user and a Web or email server to use extremely weaker 512-bit keys which can be easily decrypted. Johns Hopkins crypto researcher Matthew Green along with security experts from the University of Michigan and the French research institute Inria has discovered LogJam a few months ago and published a technical report that details the flaw. Logjam — Cousin of FREAK Logjam encryption flaw sounds just like FREAK vulnerability disclosed at the beginning of March.  ...

The spy agencies' activities have gone on for more than a decade. Now we have enough details about how the NSA eavesdrops on the internet, another explosive news has emerged yesterday from the Snowden files that NSA has the ability to decrypt most of anything that is on the internet. They have done this not through cracking encryption mathematically, but by secretly using influence and billions of dollars to insert backdoors designed to preserve their ability to eavesdrop.  Also the majority of devices connected to the Tor anonymity network may be using encryption keys that can be broken by the National Security Agency, according to Rob Graham, CEO of penetration testing firm Errata Security. The ability to crack high-level encryption is something that has been a pretty significant legend in the infosec community. Graham arrived at that conclusion after analyzing nearly 23,000 Tor connections through an exit node that Graham controls and about 76 perc...

Encrypted messaging app Signal has announced an update to the Signal Protocol to add support for quantum resistance by upgrading the Extended Triple Diffie-Hellman ( X3DH ) specification to Post-Quantum Extended Diffie-Hellman ( PQXDH ). "With this upgrade, we are adding a layer of protection against the threat of a quantum computer being built in the future that is powerful enough to break current encryption standards," Signal's Ehren Kret  said . The development comes weeks after Google added support for  quantum-resistant encryption algorithms  in its Chrome web browser and announced a  quantum-resilient FIDO2 security key implementation  as part of its OpenSK security keys initiative last month. The  Signal Protocol  is a set of cryptographic specifications that provides end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for private text and voice communications. It's used in various messaging apps like WhatsApp and Google's encrypted RCS messages for Android. Whi...

Yet another bluetooth hacking technique has been uncovered. A highly critical cryptographic vulnerability has been found affecting some Bluetooth implementations that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker in physical proximity of targeted devices to intercept, monitor or manipulate the traffic they exchange. The Bluetooth hacking vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-5383, affects firmware or operating system software drivers from some major vendors including Apple, Broadcom, Intel, and Qualcomm, while the implication of the bug on Google, Android and Linux are still unknown. The security vulnerability is related to two Bluetooth features—Bluetooth low energy (LE) implementations of Secure Connections Pairing in operating system software, and BR/EDR implementations of Secure Simple Pairing in device firmware. How the Bluetooth Hack Works? Researchers from the Israel Institute of Technology discovered that the Bluetooth specification recommends, but does not mandate...

A group of researchers has detailed a new timing vulnerability in Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol that could potentially allow an attacker to break the encryption and read sensitive communication under specific conditions. Dubbed " Raccoon Attack ," the server-side attack exploits a side-channel in the cryptographic protocol (versions 1.2 and lower) to extract the shared secret key used for secure communications between two parties. "The root cause for this side channel is that the TLS standard encourages non-constant-time processing of the DH secret," the researchers explained their findings in a paper. "If the server reuses ephemeral keys, this side channel may allow an attacker to recover the premaster secret by solving an instance of the Hidden Number Problem." However, the academics stated that the vulnerability is hard to exploit and relies on very precise timing measurements and on a specific server configuration to be exploitable. ...

Researchers have found that even after having an advanced encryption scheme in place, more than 100 million Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices from thousands of vendors are vulnerable to a downgrade attack that could allow attackers to gain unauthorized access to your devices. The issue resides in the implementation of Z-Wave protocol —a wireless, radio frequency (RF) based communications technology that is primarily being used by home automation devices to communicate with each other. Z-Wave protocol has been designed to offer an easy process to set up pairing and remotely control appliances—such as lighting control, security systems, thermostats, windows, locks, swimming pools and garage door openers—over a distance of up to 100 meters (330 feet). The latest security standard for Z-Wave, called S2 security framework, uses an advanced key exchange mechanism, i.e., Elliptic-Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) anonymous key agreement protocol, to share unique network keys between the con...

WhatsApp acquisition may have had a negative impact on the reputation of the company, it seems many users are planning to switch the service and a few of them have already done it. In our previous article, we have mentioned that why you should switch from WhatsApp to an encrypted Chat messaging service . Mobile messaging apps often used to deliver sensitive data or used for personal and corporate communications, so the data stored by the service provider should be encrypted end-to-end, which is not yet in the case of WhatsApp. There are many mobile messaging applications like Japan-based  Line , China's  WeChat , Korea-based  KakaoTalk , and Canada's  Kik , India-based  Hike  and many more, but they are not end-to-end encrypted messengers. Time is loudly announcing the need to shift to some alternates which provides end-to-end encryption for communication between two devices and respect your Privacy. There are a number of solutions available...

Remember OpenSSL Heartbleed vulnerability ? Several weeks ago, the exposure of this security bug chilled the Internet, revealed that millions of websites were vulnerable to a flaw in the OpenSSL code which they used to encrypt their communications. Now once again the OpenSSL Foundation has issued software updates to patch six new vulnerabilities, and two of them are critical. MAN-IN-THE-MIDDLE ATTACK (CVE-2014-0224) First critical vulnerability (CVE-2014-0224) in OpenSSL is " CCS Injection " - resides in ChangeCipherSpec (CCS) request sent during the handshake that could allow an attacker to perform a man-in-the-middle attack against the encrypted connection servers and clients.  By exploiting this vulnerability an attacker could intercept an encrypted connection which allows him to decrypt, read or manipulate the data. But the reported flaw is exploitable only if both server and client are vulnerable to this issue. According to the OpenSSL advisory , " An attacker...

Easy Router PIN Guessing with new WiFi Setup vulnerability There is a newly discovered vulnerability in the WiFi Protected Setup standard that reduces the number of attempts it would take an attacker to brute-force the PIN for a wireless router's setup process. The flaw results in too much information about the PIN being returned to an attacker and makes the PIN quite weak, affecting the security of millions of WiFi routers and access points. Security researcher Stefan Viehbock discovered the vulnerability (PDF) and reported it to US-CERT .  The problem affects a number of vendors' products, including D-Link, Netgear, Linksys and Buffalo. " I noticed a few really bad design decisions which enable an efficient brute force attack, thus effectively breaking the security of pretty much all WPS-enabled Wi-Fi routers. As all of the of the more recent router models come with WPS enabled by default, this affects millions of devices worldwide " Viehbock said. " One ...

Apple has released updates to patch dozens of security vulnerabilities in iOS and OS X Yosemite operating system. The updates include iOS 8.4 version of the mobile operating system, OS X Yosemite 10.10.4 and Security Update 2015-005. iOS 8.4 Update The iOS 8.4  update includes patches for over 20 security vulnerabilities that could lead to remote code execution (RCE) , application termination, the intercepted encrypted traffic, man-in-the-middle attacks and other problem. Certificate trust policy issues, buffer overflow vulnerabilities, apache compatibility issues, memory corruption flaws, and a host of WebKit, kernel, and CoreText vulnerabilities were also patched in the latest iOS update. OS X Yosemite 10.10.4 update The OS X Yosemite 10.10.4 update includes patches for QuickTime, ImageIO, and OpenSSL along with Remote Code Execution (RCE) flaws and other issues that may allow attackers to gain elevated privileges or crash applications. The Safar...

A late-stage candidate encryption algorithm that was meant to withstand decryption by powerful quantum computers in the future has been trivially cracked by using a computer running Intel Xeon CPU in an hour's time. The algorithm in question is SIKE — short for Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation — which made it to the  fourth round  of the Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) standardization process initiated by the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). "Ran on a single core, the appended  Magma   code  breaks the Microsoft  SIKE challenges  $IKEp182 and $IKEp217 in about 4 minutes and 6 minutes, respectively," KU Leuven researchers Wouter Castryck and Thomas Decru  said  in a new paper. "A run on the SIKEp434 parameters, previously believed to meet NIST's quantum security level 1, took about 62 minutes, again on a single core." The code was executed on an Intel  Xeon CPU E5-2630v2 ...