Vlad the Inhaler

Comment Threads

• Bill Arnold commented on Follow the money: Apple vs. the FBI
  Note that iPhones default to Simple Passcode (I think that's the default) but allow much longer alphanumeric plus special character passcodes (or passphrases). Plus there is some rate limiting on key exhaustion simply due to the hashing. An attack on a newer iPhone with a long passcode/passphrase might need to involve a more sophisticated hardware attack....
• Greg. Tingey commented on Follow the money: Apple vs. the FBI
  Talking of FOLLOWING the MONEY ..... What's the "entertainment" value of the "business wikileaks" exposure in Pananma? I must admit that the "fun" could be an interesting spectator-sport....
• Bill Arnold commented on Follow the money: Apple vs. the FBI
  Have to admit that the Panama Files ("The Panama Papers") made me laugh Monday morning. Pretty close to everything one could wish for in a leak - embarrassing almost entirely rich and powerful rule skirters and breakers....
• Surly Badger commented on Follow the money: Apple vs. the FBI
  @#134: I used to work with Denny Branstad some years after he left NIST. One time he told me a funny story about the DES, and it went like this: NSA improved the design of the S-boxes to make them more resistant to cryptanalysis because someone 'forgot' to tell them that the DES was going to be a software implementation. Apparently they thought Coppersmith was working on a chip that was going in a special chip IBM was going to make for a thing kind of like a SWIFT terminal. Apparently there was some pulling out of fistfuls of hair...
• Pigeon commented on Follow the money: Apple vs. the FBI
  Well, DES is another of those things like GPS, where the original system design got overtaken by advances in processing power. DES was originally intended for a hardware implementation, and was supposed to be hard to implement efficiently in software. But the DES custom hardware never really happened, as general-purpose processors rapidly got powerful enough that they could handle it natively just fine. Not that long afterwards came the embarrassment: general-purpose processors getting powerful enough to brute-force it. Which is why original-style single DES is never used these days, and instead triple DES is the standard method (ie. DES the...