The US government couldn’t exactly hide the 72m-high Delta IV Heavy rocket that took off from Vandenberg Air Force Base on Thursday, but the details of what the military and intelligence craft was carrying into space are far more secretive. The rocket – the biggest to launch from the US west coast - was supposedly carrying a classified satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), to be put into polar orbit.
Exact specifications on that satellite are unknown, but the NRO does supply information to the CIA and US Department of Defense, which has led to speculation that high-resolution imagery will be the main priority. The Delta IV has a payload space measuring roughly 63 feet in length and just short of 17 feet in diameter.
Upgrading the SLC-6 launch pad for the Delta IV cost around $100m, though it’s expected that the site will be used for more launches now that the investment has been made. While discussions have taken place about using the rocket for manned missions, at present only military and intelligence missions have been undertaken.
It’s hardly a fresh idea — researchers have claimed that GSM calls could be cracked and listened in on for years. But there’s a difference between being able to do something with a $50,000 machine and a warrant, and being able to do the same thing with a few $15 Motorola phones, a laptop, open source software and 180 seconds of spare time. Security Research Labs researcher Karsten Nohl and OsmocomBB project programmer Sylvain Munaut recently spoke about a new GSM hack at the Chaos Communication Conference in Berlin, and they were able to walk the audience through the eavesdropping process in a matter of minutes. According to them, it’s not terribly difficult to use a $15 handset to “sniff out” location data used to correctly route calls and texts, and once you’ve nailed that down, you could use modified firmware to feed raw data into a laptop for decryption. Using a 2TB table of precomputed encryption keys, a cracking program was able to break in within 20 seconds — after that, you’re just moments away from recording a live GSM call between two phones. Of course, speeches like these are made to encourage security officials to beef up the layers between you and ill-willed individuals, but it’s hard to say what (if anything) will change. For now, we’d recommend just flying to each and every person you’d like to speak with. Unless you live in the Greater New York area — you’re probably better off risking a hacked conversation than heading out to LGA / JFK / EWR.
Perhaps you’re so into your everyday life that you’d like to record it all? Now you can, you ol’ fashion conscious geek hipster nerd. These particular glasses have a fat gray rim all around, probably you could get a prescription lens in there if you’d like, and right in the middle is a HD 1280 x 960 resolution camera that records at 30 frames per second. Not too shabby! All video then goes straight to a MicroSD card slot where you’ll be putting in anything up to 8GB.
You can also take still images at the same resolution and the batteries in these love goggles provide what they say is two to three hours on a single charge (which is done via USB.) But wait – there’s more. One thing that’s really amazingly backward about these sweet rims is a blinking LED light indicator. What in the world? Might as well just use a camera so large you can’t carry it if you’re going to be blinking green from your face. Cripes! Still I want a pair. They’re not branded though really, so I’m a teensy bit skeptical about their overall quality.
You might recall back in February the story broke that a school district in Pa. had been accused of spying on students without their knowledge using the webcams on school provided laptops. The story came to light when a student was warned that he was acting inappropriately inside his home.
The FBI later came in to investigate the issue and determine if there were any criminal issues in the case such as wire tapping. The story is apparently at an end, at least with the criminal investigation with the announcement that no charges will be filed in connection with the investigation.
US Attorney Zane David Memeger has announced that the investigators found no evidence that the Lower Merion School district employees who activated the tracking software and took the thousands of webcam and screenshot images had criminal intent. The district admitted to capturing a total of 56,000 screen shots and webcam images to locate missing laptops. A civil suit in the matter is still pending.
Sci-fi movies often present us with omniscient villains who are able to track the most minute actions of their underlings and foes. Rarely do we get a glimpse into their surveillance systems, but you have to imagine that some of the more rudimentary “employee evaluation” hardware will not be too far off from KDDI‘s latest. The Japanese cellphone giant has unveiled a new system, built around accelerometers, that can detect the difference between a cleaner scrubbing or sweeping a floor and merely walking along it. Based on new analytical software, stored remotely, this should provide not only accurate positional information about workers, but also a detailed breakdown of their activities. The benefits touted include “central monitoring, “salesforce optimisation,” and improvements in employee efficiency. We’re guessing privacy concerns were filed away in a collateral damage folder somewhere.
Looks like all that GSM code-cracking is progressing faster than we thought. Soon after the discovery of the 64-bit A5/1 GSM encryption flaw last month, the geniuses at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science went ahead and cracked the KASUMI system — a 128-bit A5/3 algorithm implemented across 3G networks — in less than two hours. If you must know, the method applied is dubbed ‘related-key sandwich attack’ where multiple values of known differentials are processed through the first seven rounds of KASUMI, then using resulting quartets that are identified sharing key differences, subkey materials can be obtained in round eight to build up the 128-bit key. Sure, it’s hardly snooping-on-the-go at this speed, but worryingly this was only an ‘unoptimized implementation… on a single PC.’ At the same time, the paper condemns the presumably red-faced GSM Association for moving from MISTY — a more computationally-expensive but much stronger predecessor algorithm — to KASUMI. Guess we’ll just have to stick with Skype.
Looks like all that GSM code-cracking is progressing faster than we thought. Soon after the discovery of the 64-bit A5/1 GSM encryption flaw last month, the geniuses at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science went ahead and cracked the KASUMI system — a 128-bit A5/3 algorithm implemented across 3G networks — in less than two hours. If you must know, the method applied is dubbed ‘related-key sandwich attack’ where multiple values of known differentials are processed through the first seven rounds of KASUMI, then using resulting quartets that are identified sharing key differences, subkey materials can be obtained in round eight to build up the 128-bit key. Sure, it’s hardly snooping-on-the-go at this speed, but worryingly this was only an ‘unoptimized implementation… on a single PC.’ At the same time, the paper condemns the presumably red-faced GSM Association for moving from MISTY — a more computationally-expensive but much stronger predecessor algorithm — to KASUMI. Guess we’ll just have to stick with Skype.
Did you know that the vast majority of calls carried out on the 3.5 billion GSM connections in the world today are protected by a 21-year old 64-bit encryption algorithm? You should now, given that the A5/1 privacy algorithm, devised in 1988, has been deciphered by German computer engineer Karsten Nohl and published as a torrent for fellow code cracking enthusiasts and less benevolent forces to exploit. Worryingly, Karsten and his crew of merry men obtained the binary codes by simple brute force — they fed enough random strings of numbers in to effectively guess the password. The GSM Association — which has had a 128-bit A5/3 key available since 2007, but found little takeup from operators — has responded by having a whinge about Mr. Nohl’s intentions and stating that operators could just modify the existing code to re-secure their networks. Right, only a modified 64-bit code is just as vulnerable to cracking as the one that just got cracked. It’s important to note that simply having the code is not in itself enough to eavesdrop on a call, as the cracker would be faced with just a vast stream of digital communications — but Karsten comes back to reassure us that intercepting software is already available in customizable open source varieties. So don’t be like Tiger, keep your truly private conversations off the airwaves, at least for a while.
The US government couldn’t exactly hide the 72m-high Delta IV Heavy rocket that took off from Vandenberg Air Force Base on Thursday, but the details of what the military and intelligence craft was carrying into space are far more secretive. The rocket – the biggest to launch from the US west coast - was supposedly carrying a classified satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), to be put into polar orbit.
