Using Capsicum For Sandboxing
FreeBSD 9.0, released in January 2012, has experimental Capsicum support in the kernel, disabled by default. In FreeBSD 10, Capsicum will be enabled by default.
But unless code uses it, we get no benefit. So far, very little code uses Capsicum, mostly just experiments we did for our paper. I figured it was time to start...
EFF Finally Notice 0day Market
Six years after I first blogged about it, the EFF have decided that selling 0days may not be so great.
Maybe they should be reading my blog?
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Certificate Transparency Sites
I may not have said much more about Certificate Transparency, but we’ve been working on it. So, those interested in following along (or joining in) are welcome to look at…
Website.
Mailing list.
Code repository.
The code repository also inc...
Fixing CAs
Adam Langley and I have a proposal to bolster up the rather fragile Certificate Authority infrastructure.
TL;DNR: certificates are registered in a public audit log. Servers present proofs that their certificate is registered, along with the certificate itself. Clients check these proofs and domain owners monitor the logs. If a CA mis-issues a certificate then either
There...
Lessons Not Learned
Anyone who has not had their head under a rock knows about the DigiNotar fiasco.
And those who’ve been paying attention will also know that DigiNotar’s failure is only the most recent in a long series of proofs of what we’ve known for a long time: Certificate Authorities are nothing but a money-making scam. They provide...
DNSSEC on the Google Certificate Catalog
I mentioned my work on the Google Certificate Catalog a while back. Now I’ve updated it to sign responses with DNSSEC.
I also updated the command-line utility to verify DNSSEC responses – and added a little utility to fetch the root DNSSEC ...
Hayden: Google Acting as a Nation-State
Great to see somebody on top of things, here Michael Hayden, previously director of the NSA and the CIA in the context of the Shady Rat attacks: “You see Google acting in some ways as nation-states used to act, exercising to the best of their ability...
An Efficient and Practical Distributed Currency
Now that I’ve said what I don’t like about Bitcoin, it’s time to talk about efficient alternatives.
In my previous paper on the subject I amused myself by hypothesizing an efficient alternative to Bitcoin based on whatever mechanism it uses to achieve consensus on checkpoints. Whilst this is fun, it is pretty clear that no such...
Keys to the Kingdom
Drummond Reed was so generous to respond to my recent post about how to recognize an Identity Implementation Fail. The following paragraph in Drummond’s post set me to thinking: Even Microsoft with their design for Information Cards (which are the closest we’ve ever come to full asymmetric key-based security infrastructure) never fully solved that problem....
How to Spot an Unnecessary Identity Fail
I’ve been watching the recent announcements about how hackers—some speculate foreign countries—have cracked the security infrastructure of a system and have stolen the names and passwords of thousands—sometimes millions—of customers. The details of all these disasters are not what I want to talk about. Just this simple and seemingly obvious point. Any system that stores...
What do they want us to do?
[Dave Birch] Politicians don't know what to do about the Internet, and there's no possibility of explaining it to them. Time for professional responsibility to set the requirements.
It’s Time To Abolish SSL Certificate Authorities