Cryptosmith

A reader pointed me to an apparently dull collection of NSA documents recently posted by that useful source, GovernmentAttic.org. One of the hidden gems is a “CMI Newsletter” containing a eight pages of crypto puzzles.

I’ve taken the liberty of posting the CMI Newsletter separately (PDF, click this link), but kudos go to GovernmentAttic for dredging up this diamond in the rough. If you work out answers, feel free to post them here, or at least provide a pingback so interested people can find them.

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When Joanne emailed me this video a few days ago, I responded with “Yes, yes, of course. Copiers are digital. They save stuff.” But then I watched the video. THIS IS BAD:

This is why all hard drives should have built-in encryption.

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A while back, Popular Science asked me to identify the Best New Security Technology. At the time I simply couldn’t think of anything, and they’ve long since published their issue filled with Best New ____ Technology.

I finally thought of something – self-encrypting mass storage. This can be anything from an encrypting USB drive – the IronKey if you like theatrics – to a self-encrypting hard drive like Seagate’s Momentus line of laptop drives.

While I also rely heavily on software drive encryption (TrueCrypt) I wish that all my hard drives had full disk encryption (FDE). If all drives had FDE, I could recycle drives (i.e. give them to my kids) just by erasing the key. Instead, I have to hook each drive up to an idle machine for a day or so to run a wiping process.

So FDE isn’t just for security paranoids and folks hogtied by compliance regulations. They’re useful for everyone. That is, assuming that the vendors make it easy to use them.

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I’ve always been a fan of graphic presentations. More people understand graphs and diagrams than understand equations. While this is a bad thing in some ways, it remains a fact. So it’s always great to see a graphical representation of a really difficult set of concepts.

Jeff Moser Fisher has posted A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). He has wisely structured it in layers. Interested readers can learn about AES to their level of interest or understanding: they can get the history and process, the high-level summary, or go diving into S-boxes.

Great!

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