Christmas Cipher Competition
As I haven’t posted for a while, I felt obliged to write something for Christmas. Cyber Security Challenge UK are running yet another one of their cool challenges with a nice prize. Up for grabs is a Pico SAM9G45 board with an ARM9 CPU (board link here) and a small 4.3 inch touch screen (screen link here).
All that seems to have been provided is a picture containing the Cipher-text, but there are no clues about what Cipher has been used or what attack could be employed to reveal the plain-text.
More information can be found about the challenge here. I don’t have much time to look at the problem at the moment, but it seems like the whole answer could be in the picture. The site has also dropped some UserID’s for twitter, so I would also take a look at their conversation history to see if they mention anything of interest.
Merry Christmas/Cryptmas All!
How To Get Away With Stealing
I’ve been watching a lot of Vice documentaries lately, as their obscure articles and odd journalists are proving to be much more exciting then most of the mainstream media. One video in particular really caught my eye, which is about fraud and fraudsters in England.
It’s quite worrying to think that fraud can be committed so easily, especially as I’ve given my card details, national insurance number and passport information away countless times in the past for job interviews, bank applications and many other reasons. The video goes to show just how poor some major retailers are at setting the correct policies, and providing the right staff-training to identify and deal with fraud. Enjoy.
An Affordable Android x86 Test Platform
For those of you who don’t know, Intel recently released their first commercial Android phone, the Intel AZ210. The phone has been launched successfully in India (known as the XOLO X900), the United Kingdom (known as the Orange San Diego) and in Russia as the Megaphone Mini.
The phone contains a full powered Intel Atom processor which has been shrunk down to grant better battery life and a smaller footprint. The phone is not aimed at the high end market, but more the mid-range and has a very good price tag for the features it delivers.
I’ve been using this particular device for a while as a work phone and for Android Development. Intel provide a nice website with some tools to help developers with the Android platform:
In particular, the Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager is pretty useful if your processor supports Intel VT Technology, usually the Android Emulator is very slow:
http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-hardware-accelerated-execution-manager/
I’d really recommend the Intel phone for anyone who is looking for a cheap android platform to work with, there are still many apps out there which do not support the X86 platform for one reason or another and with prices this low, I don’t see why more people aren’t compiling for that instruction set.
If you’re interested in Purchasing a San Diego within the UK, please check out Orange’s website:
http://shop.orange.co.uk/mobile-phones/san-diego-from-orange
Siemens Sabotage Iran’s Nuclear Programme
I saw some videos shooting around on the internet recently from an Iranian TV Channel which show supposed defective nuclear parts supplied by Siemens:
The parts apparently have been tampered such that they have a version of Stuxnet embedded into their hardware. Stuxnet is a highly sophisticated computer worm, which targets Siemens industrial software and equipment. According to several sources, the worm has been used to monitor (and sabotage) five different Iranian organisations, which are suspected to be part of a uranium enrichment infrastructure.
There are also a couple of pictures here: http://t.co/dbNRylY5
NIST announces winner, Keccak is SHA-3
NIST has just announced the winner for their competition and the Keccak algorithm has been selected to become SHA-3.
According to Bruce Schneier, it’s a fine choice and the algorithm is not based around the previous SHA-2 family, which is good news.
I’d like to say congratulations to the winning team, as they have done such a good job at designing a nice hash algorithm for the world to use!
NIST has also done a great job of running the competition, and I am excited to see the next one start in a few years. Heck, I even hope to participate!
I’m now wondering how long it will take for this algorithm to be implemented on the various development-platforms (.NET, PHP), so I can start using it within my applications…