Cryptosmith

In honor of the electoral season, I’m sharing an old photograph. The occasion was a visit by Senator John McCain (R-AZ) to Secure Computing in June, 1999. We discussed possible revisions to cryptographic export controls, and he posed for photos, holding a copy of Internet Cryptography, which was ‘recently published’ back then.

I don’t want to turn this into a political blog - this posting simply reports on the visit. Continue Reading »

Posted under Information Security | 1 Comment »

It used to be that the default password was your mother’s maiden name, your SSN, your birthdate, or something like that. Now you have to pick a password, and your ‘password recovery’ questions are based on those old stand-by questions. So you can still break in to a person’s accounts by answering those classic questions.

There have been some interesting recent reports about the use of personal questions for password resetting, and Bob Sullivan has summarized them in a recent posting.

This problem will only disappear over time, as people learn how NOT to lose security credentials. Continue Reading »

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I received an e-mail from a mutual friend named Jim Burrows who was decrying the state of information security, blaming it on the lack of good models for solving modern security problems. I have to agree, and I admit I don’t have a glib answer.

A few weeks back, Gunnar Peterson posted some comments relevant to this discussion of modern security policy, but I haven’t managed to frame response to that one, either.

At least, I can agree that traditional models are broken. I believe there are some fundamentals that remain constant, but the high level attempt to build firewalled enclaves is clearly obsolete (except for a very few special situations). Continue Reading »

Posted under Information Security | 3 Comments »

Thanks to Gary Krall, tech director of PIP at Verisign, I have a recipe for “works every time” OpenID delegation with their free PIP service. First, what is OpenID delegation?

Delegation lets you use your very own URL as your identity URL for logging in with OpenID. For example, I can use http://www.cryptosmith.com/ to log in to web sites. To do this, you have to provide some special statements (a.k.a. magic) in your HTTP files that redirects the OpenID process from your web site to the service that actually does your OpenID authentication.

Continue Reading »

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