The default implementation for KeyStore, the system in Android designed to store user credentials and cryptographic keys, is broken, researchers say. In a an academic paper published this week, researchers argue that the particular encryption scheme that KeyStore uses fails to protect the integrity of keys and could be exploited to allow an attacker to modify...

At last week’s Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, Apple announced some security upgrades around Gatekeeper and a new filesystem that includes native support for encryption. Mac hacker Patrick Wardle, director of research at Synack, explains whether this a big deal and how the upgrades address some problems he’d disclosed to Apple. Download: Patrick_Wardle_on_MacOS_Gatekeeper_Security.mp3 Music by Chris Gonsalves

Last year’s Superfish and eDellRoot bloatware mishaps exposed the security nightmare that pre-installed software updaters can create on new laptops. And while these two high-profile incidents made the issue public, they’re hardly isolated cases. Many popular consumer and business laptops from manufacturers such as Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus and Acer include bloatware that have a...

Jon Callas, equal parts security entrepreneur and innovator, has been hired at Apple for what will be his third stint with the company. Callas left Silent Circle, a company he cofounded, in April after four years there. Silent Circle designs and produces secure communication platforms, including the Blackphone and Silent Phone mobile devices, Silent OS...

Reaction to the release of Google’s Allo messaging app has been mixed since it was unveiled Wednesday during Google’s I/O event. Allo has two modes, a normal mode run by an artificial intelligence that includes Google Assistant. It analyzes messages and offers suggestions based on the content that could include things like restaurant, movie or...

The criminals behind the TeslaCrypt ransomware have closed up shop and publicly released the master decryption key that unlocks files encrypted by the malware. The news is significant given the investment and constant innovation devoted to TeslaCrypt, which has been one of the most active crypto-ransomware strains since it debuted in February 2015. Researchers at...

Google clarified this week exactly when it plans to disable support for the RC4 stream cipher and the SSLv3 protocol on the company’s SMTP servers and Gmail’s web servers. It turns out the end will come sooner than later; the company announced it will begin to disable both a month from now, on June 16....

Two University of Texas academics have made what some experts believe is a breakthrough in random number generation that could have longstanding implications for cryptography and computer security. David Zuckerman, a computer science professor, and Eshan Chattopadhyay, a graduate student, published a paper in March that will be presented in June at the Symposium on...

Mike Mimoso, Chris Brook, and Threatpost’s newest reporter, Tom Spring, discuss the week in news, including a first hand account of an online casino’s experience with a Teslacrypt infection, Brazil shutting down WhatsApp, and attackers mining an ADP portal for W-2s. Download: Threatpost_News_Wrap_May_6_2016.mp3 Music by Chris Gonsalves

The latest batch of OpenSSL security patches were released today, with a pair of high-severity flaws and four low-severity issues addressed in OpenSSL 1.0.1t and OpenSSL 1.0.2h. One of the high-severity flaws, CVE-2016-2107, opens the door to a padding oracle attack that can allow for the decryption of traffic if the connection uses an AES CBC...