Back in August, I attended the CRYPTO 2006conference in Santa Barbara, where Daniel Bleichenbacher gave aneye-opening talk that highlighted a very common implementation mistakepeople make with the RSA cryptosystem. Since my own background is incryptography I thought I would try to describe not only this commonmistake and its implications, but also some details regarding why thismistake leads to vulnerabilities, in a way that’s hopefully suitablefor a wide audience. For those who don’t recognize the name, Daniel isa well-known and brilliant cryptographer who, among other things, foundcryptographic flaws in SSL v3.0 and also the random number generatorassociated with the Digital Signature Algorithm. Well, he is at itagain!

Before going any further I want to emphasize thatthe flaw Daniel found is not one that is inherent in the RSA algorithmitself; rather, it deals with a specific...

A few months ago, my boss plonked a box on my desk and said "see what you can do with that." That's how I was introduced to the Blackberry. I've been interested in all kinds of PDAs and mobile phones for years now, but I'd never come across a Blackberry. I suppose that up until recently, it has been the preserve of key government and corporate employees, not average-Joe software engineers like me. However, the Blackberry is emerging as an ever more popular platform for the general public. In the next few weeks that followed, I noticed a common thread in the architecture and features of the device: security first and functionality second.

What do I mean?
Well, take Bluetooth for example. When you're looking at the box of your shiny new Blackberry and you see that it has Bluetooth support, you might think "great, I can use it with my laptop to go online while on the move." Bzzzt—wrong. Although the Blackberry does...

Many of the new threats seen today aren’t advancements in their own right; rather, they just take advantage of advancements in technology. For example, VBScript enables programs to be written quickly, but also makes writing malware extremely easy. Remember VBS.LoveLetter, also known as the “I-Love-You” worm? This was a mass-mailing worm that ultimately ended up causing millions of dollars worth of damage because of crashed servers, not to mention the punitive damages caused by files being overwritten. While VBScripts gave administrators the ability to perform more robust tasks via scripting, developers need to be aware of the possible detrimental effects of these new technologies. For example, after VBS worms became widespread, Microsoft forced user consent before a script could harness Microsoft Outlook to send itself, thereby neutering that attack vector.

Another seemingly innocuous feature has been extremely useful to some malware writers. The advent of...

It's been a week since I finished my VB talk (almost on time). WhileI didn't get to the part of the talk exploring computer games and fun videosand their relevance to teaching people about security (and computerskills in general, and life skills, too!), I did get some interestingfeedback from some of the delegates. The one thing I've heard mostconsistently is that the ideas my talk put forth apply to technicalpeople, as well as not-quite-so-technical people. My first reactionwas—“wow”. I was hoping it would eventually get around to this. Onepurpose of the paper was to initiate bridge building between differentmindsets. The fact that I was able to get this across in the firstsegment of this research is just, well, unexpected.

People seemed...