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....

Google has announced its timeline for deprecating SHA-1 certificates, despite concerns expressed recently that sunsetting the broken encryption hashing algorithm will disconnect millions from the Internet. SHA-1’s demise has been accelerated in recent months since researchers published a paper explaining that practical collision attacks could be months, instead of years, away. Google, on Friday, announced...

Nothing in Google’s arsenal carries more weight than its search engine rankings. Pair that weapon with a desire to inspire encrypted connections on the web, and you have a pretty powerful combination. More than a year ago, Google said it was testing a method where a site’s search ranking would be influenced by whether it...

Now that encryption has been elevated to a default technology on mobile devices, the government has heightened its “Going Dark” rhetoric, again on Wednesday insisting during a Senate Judicial Committee hearing that Silicon Valley figure out how to deliver plain-text communication between criminal and terror suspects to law enforcement. FBI Director James Comey and California...

The Let’s Encrypt initiative reached yet another milestone this week when it entered public beta, something it claims should help make it easier for website owners to embrace HTTPS encryption. The latest step comes on the heels of the movement issuing its first certificate back in September and becoming an official Certificate Authority in October. Now, anyone...

In March when Moxie Marlinspike and Open Whisper Systems released the iOS version of the Signal encrypted messaging app, the noted security researcher promised to expand its reach and among other things, eventually release a desktop version of Signal. That vision was realized on Wednesday with the public availability of the Signal Desktop beta, written...