The concept of dead drops, where USB thumbdrives are installed in public places for the distribution of files “off the grid” has been a popular topic. Now Steve Schuler writes in with his new take on this concept currently featured … Read more
Adam Laurie (a/k/a/ Major Malfunction) is a white hat hacker from London, UK, who has presented at a number of conferences worldwide. He’s also the Director at Aperature Labs, Ltd. Recently he explored the broken HDCP security mechanism used in … Read more
At the recent SkyDogCon conference, Bob Weiss and Benjamin Gatti presented this talk analyzing Enigma, the World War II era Nazi encryption machine. The encryption theory behind Enigma is covered, including a detailed under-the-hood view of a typical device. Finally, … Read more
At the recently concluded DEFCON 20 conference in Las Vegas, attendees were presented with this decryption challenge by KoreLogic Security. Take their collection of encrypted password hashes and a bundle of encrypted files and see how many you can crack. … Read more
Parallax has recently added two new encryption objects to their Propeller Object Exchange. Mark Tillotson has released his AES object. He describes it as an “efficient implementation of the Advanced Encryption Standard in PASM. Supports 128, 192 and 256 bit … Read more
The APCO25 (P25) communications protocol is a form of digital radio communications technology growing in popularity in police and other public safety radio systems in the US and abroad. Many such systems are unencrypted and can be received on digital … Read more
APCO Project 25 is a digital modulation protocol used by a growing number of public safety radio systems and to a limited extent by Amateur Radio Operators. APCO P25 radio transmissions are capable of being monitored by scanning receivers from … Read more
When you decide to copy protect the firmware on your MCU, how effective are efforts such as setting a lock bit or enabling chip erase modes? Sergei P. Skorobogatov’s article provides an overview of the methods he’s tried against MCUs … Read more
OK, so it isn’t open source… but it is free (today only)! CNET is making available FREE downloads of PC Lock™ privacy encryption software for your PC. Just visit this link and follow the instructions. It will provide you with … Read more
Atmel today announced the release of the ATSHA204 the first turnkey, optimized authentication device to include a 4.5Kbit EEPROM and a hardware SHA-256 accelerator. Fully tested ASF software libraries are available for Atmel AVR® and ARM®-based microcontrollers and are integrated … Read more
Henryk Plötz and Milosch Meriac gave a presentation at the recent 27C3 Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin, Germany, in which they demystified the HID iClass. One of the challenges of breaking iCLASS RFID readers was to extract the firmware and … Read more
Nathan Fain and Vadik presented at the 27C3 Chaos Communications Congress held recently in Berlin, Germany, on a topic of interest to us all: JTAG/Serial/FLASH/PCB Embedded Reverse Engineering Tools and Techniques. Check out their webpage for full documentation and analysis.
What could you do with an array of 15 FPGAs? Why not attack hashes! NSA@home is a fast FPGA-based SHA-1 and MD5 bruteforce cracker. It is capable of searching the full 8-character keyspace (from a 64-character set) in about a … Read more
Robust encryption is often difficult to achieve on a microcontroller given the limited processing power and memory. The Microchip PIC18 series are capable of some forms of limited data encryption. Four encryption algorithms including AES, XTEA, SKIPJACK® and a simple … Read more
The power of microcontrollers is limited relative to FPGAs. Nevertheless, Das-labor has developed a set of implementations of different cryptographic algorithms in C designed to function within the limited memory space of microcontrollers. Check out the Avr-Crypto Wiki.
Arnaud Lagger has published some interesting work on the use of FPGAs in encryption. Unlike other docs we’ve seen, this analysis is both comprehensive and detailed, including an appendix with the VHDL source code. Definitely worth the read for anyone … Read more
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