Since technology companies such as Google and Apple turned on end-to-end encryption by default and tied encryption keys to device passwords, the government’s inability to compel providers via warrants to turn over data has caused considerable angst. Going Dark is the government’s catch-all phrase for the current state of affairs, and high-ranking officials such as...

The OpenSSL project team today patched two vulnerabilities in the crypto library, one of which is rated high severity and exposes many popular applications to attack. The patches are in new releases of OpenSSL, 1.0.1r and 1.0.2f, along with an enhancement to the strength of the cryptography in a previous mitigation for last year’s Logjam...

Most U.S. government agencies have until Feb. 4 to audit their IT infrastructure for the use of backdoored Juniper Networks’ Netscreen firewalls. Letters went out late last week from the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee to the leaders of the various agencies asking them to provide the committee with a report on whether the...

OpenSSL is scheduled to update two versions of the software this week, patching a pair of vulnerabilities in the process. The OpenSSL project this morning said the updates will move users to versions 1.0.2f and 1.0.1r and should be available Thursday between 8 a.m. and noon Eastern time. “They will fix two security defects, one of...

OpenSSH today released a patch for a critical vulnerability that could be exploited by an attacker to force a client to leak private cryptographic keys. The attacker would have to control a malicious server in order to force the client to give up the key, OpenSSH and researchers at Qualys said in separate advisories. Qualys’ security...

Juniper Networks announced late Friday it was removing the suspicious Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator from its ScreenOS operating system. And while that’s heralded as a positive move considering Dual_EC’s dubious origins, there remain important and unanswered questions about Juniper’s decision to include what is considered to be a backdoored random number generator in its NetScreen...

As promised, Mozilla officially began rejecting new SHA-1 certificates as of the first of the year. And as promised, there have been some usability issues. Mozilla yesterday said that some security scanners and antivirus products are keeping some from reaching HTTPS websites. “When a user tries to connect to an HTTPS site, the man-in-the-middle device...

If you’re hanging on to the theory that collision attacks against SHA-1 and MD5 aren’t yet practical, two researchers from INRIA, the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation, have demonstrated new attacks that raise the urgency to move away from these broken cryptographic algorithms. Karthikeyan Bhargavan and Gaetan Leurent recently published an...

An attacker in a man-in-the-middle position could abuse a STARTTLS downgrade vulnerability in the Cisco Jabber client-server negotiation in order to intercept communication. Cisco warned its customers yesterday, but has yet to patch the vulnerability, which affects the Cisco Jabber clients for Windows, iPhone, iPad and Android. Researchers Renaud Dubourguais and Sébastien Dudek of Synacktiv...

The NSA’s subversion of encryption standards may have come home to roost. As more eyes examine the Juniper backdoor in ScreenOS, the operating system standing up its NetScreen VPNs, it’s becoming clear that someone backdoored the NSA backdoor in Dual_EC_DRBG, opening the door to passive decryption of any VPN traffic moving through a NetScreen gateway....