Monday, May 28, 2007

Evidence that Encrypting Data is the Easy Part / Network of Information Security and Technology News, 25 May 2007
http://www.nist.org/news.php?extend.235
"One hesitates to tell the bad guys how to cover their tracks, but it isn't like this information is secret. Chi Mak is a Chinese-born engineer that was convicted of exporting classified US defence technology to China. Most of the government's case was made after investigators were able to access the thousands of documents Chi had encrypted. No, the government didn't have to crank up a few more National Security Agency (NSA) supercomputers to break the encryption. They didn't have to cluster a few thousand quad-core computers together for the trillion year task of cracking the algorithm. They didn't even have to covertly install a keylogger to grab the bad guys password that locked the encryption key. It was so much easier than all of that. All it took to obtain the thousands of encrypted documents, the evidence needed to convict Chi, was a simple floppy disk stored in a night table."