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The potential for quantum computing to crack other countries’ encrypted networks has captured the attention of national governments. Which of the world’s fundamental challenges could be solved by quantum computing?

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A new malware strain is being distributed by threat actors via exploit kits like Fallout and RIG to hide malicious network traffic with the help of SOCKS5 proxies set up on compromised computers.

The malware, provisionally named SystemBC by the Proofpoint Threat Insight Team researchers who found it, uses secure HTTP connections to encrypt the information sent to command-and-control servers by other strains dropped on the infected machines.

“SystemBC is written in C++ and primarily sets up SOCKS5 proxies on victim computers that can then be used by threat actors to tunnel/hide the malicious traffic associated with other malware,” says Proofpoint.

A new ransomware family targeting Android devices spreads to other victims by sending text messages containing malicious links to the entire contact list found on already infected targets.

The malware dubbed Android/Filecoder. C (FileCoder) by the ESET research team which discovered it is currently targeting devices running Android 5.1 or later.

“Due to narrow targeting and flaws in both execution of the campaign and implementation of its encryption, the impact of this new ransomware is limited,” ESET’s researchers found.

The race is on to create new ways to protect data and communications from the threat posed by super-powerful quantum computers.

How dictators work in the 21st century.

The new president of Kazakhstan is now proving that he will keep the old, oppressive systems alive for the 21st century, using advanced technical tools.

The man in the middle: Beginning last week, Kazakhstan’s government is intercepting all HTTPS traffic inside the country, ZDNet reports. HTTPS is a protocol meant to offer encryption, security, and privacy to users, but now the nation’s internet service providers are forcing all users to install certificates that enable pervasive interception and surveillance.

Continue reading “How an authoritarian regime will intercept all internet traffic inside its country” »

CHICAGO, July 2 (Xinhua) — With a light-spinning device inspired by the Japanese art of paper cutting, researchers at the University of Michigan (UM) have detected microscopic twists in the internal structure of plant and animal tissue without harmful X-rays.

The approach is the first that can fully rotate terahertz radiation in real time, and could open new dimensions in medical imaging, encrypted communications and cosmology, according to a news release posted on UM’s website on Monday.

With an eye to exploring how chirality may help distinguish tissues, the researchers gathered everyday biological materials to look for differences in the absorption of clockwise- or counter-clockwise-rotating radiation in the terahertz spectrum. They studied a maple leaf, a dandelion flower, pork fat and the wing case of an iridescent beetle.

Quantum computers will not kill blockchain, but they might trigger fundamental changes in underlying cryptography.

The field has narrowed in the race to protect sensitive electronic information from the threat of quantum computers, which one day could render many of our current encryption methods obsolete.

As the latest step in its program to develop effective defenses, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has winnowed the group of potential encryption tools—known as cryptographic algorithms—down to a bracket of 26. These algorithms are the ones NIST mathematicians and computer scientists consider to be the strongest candidates submitted to its Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization project, whose goal is to create a set of standards for protecting electronic information from attack by the computers of both tomorrow and today.

“These 26 algorithms are the ones we are considering for potential standardization, and for the next 12 months we are requesting that the cryptography community focus on analyzing their performance,” said NIST mathematician Dustin Moody. “We want to get better data on how they will perform in the real world.”

In their book “Era of Exponential Encryption — Beyond Cryptographic Routing” the authors provide a vision that can demonstrate an increasing multiplication of options for encryption and decryption processes: Similar to a grain of rice that doubles exponentially in every field of a chessboard, more and more newer concepts and programming in the area of cryptography increase these manifolds: both, encryption and decryption, require more session-related and multiple keys, so that numerous options even exist for configuring hybrid encryption: with different keys and algorithms, symmetric and asymmetrical methods, or even modern multiple encryption, with that ciphertext is converted again and again to ciphertext. It will be analyzed how a handful of newer applications like e.g. Spot-On and GoldBug E-Mail Client & Crypto Chat Messenger and other open source software programming implement these encryption mechanisms. Renewing a key several times — within the dedicated session with “cryptographic calling” — has forwarded the term of “perfect forward secrecy” to “instant perfect forward secrecy” (IPFS). But even more: if in advance a bunch of keys is sent, a decoding of a message has to consider not only one present session key, but over dozens of keys are sent — prior before the message arrives. The new paradigm of IPFS has already turned into the newer concept of these Fiasco Keys are keys, which provide over a dozen possible ephemeral keys within one session and define Fiasco Forwarding, the approach which complements and follows IPFS. And further: by adding routing- and graph-theory to the encryption process, which is a constant part of the so called Echo Protocol, an encrypted packet might take different graphs and routes within the network. This shifts the current status to a new age: The Era of Exponential Encryption, so the vision and description of the authors. If routing does not require destination information but is replaced by cryptographic in.