Freelance Writing Jobs | Today's Articles | Sign In

Articles
Writers
 
Browse Sections
Home Computer Security

Computer Security Weekly, October 4, 1999


Another decryption challenge has been broken. This time it was the 97-bit elliptic curve algorithm. Interestingly, the time taken to break the code was very roughly equivalent to that recently taken to crack the RSA 155 (512-bit) algorithm. This gives an indication that elliptic curve algorithms are a lot stronger than RSA and other prime based encryption.

http://www.inria.fr/Actualites/pre55-eng... http://cristal.inria.fr/~harley/ecdl/ http://www.certicom.com/chal/

Once upon a time, there was a user at a Very Large Corporation who was fiddling around with a Linux box. By mistake, this user configured his or her box to *be* the Primary Domain Controller, instead of authenticating off the PDC. Result? All Windows NT domain authentication ceased in the company. Shows how weak NT is, right? So what does the company do? Ban Linux.
Yet another Y2K trojan. This one is currently shipping under the name Y2KCOUNT.EXE (which could change any time) and purports to be a Y2K countdown screen saver. (There already are a number of those on the market.) Remember, don't run things the provenance of which you are not certain.

http://www.vet.com.au/html/vvcc/index.ht... http://www.microsoft.com/y2k/hoax/hoax2.... http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/da...>

mailto:rslade@vcn.bc.ca
mailto:rslade@sprint.ca
mailto:robertslade@usa.net
mailto:p1@canada.com Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses, 0-387-94663-2, (800-SPRINGER)
The copyright of the article Computer Security Weekly, October 4, 1999 in Computer Security is owned by Robert Slade. Permission to republish Computer Security Weekly, October 4, 1999 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Go To Page: 1

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic

;