encryption

A British researcher has helped put into practice an encryption scheme that could better protect sensitive data while it is being used in systems such as health care computing.

The scheme involves fully homomorphic encryption, an approach that allows computation to be performed on encrypted data without the need to decrypt the data, according to Nigel Smart, professor of cryptology in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bristol.

Last year, IBM researcher Craig Gentry came up with the first homomorphic scheme, which allowed simultaneous add and multiply operations on encrypted values, called ciphertexts.

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Google began offering an encrypted option for Web searchers on Friday and said it planned to roll it out for all of its services eventually.

People who want to use the more secure search option can type "https://www.google.com" into their browser, scrambling the connection so the words and phrases they search on, and the results that Google displays, will be protected from interception.

The beta service of the secure Web search option begins in the United States on Friday and will be rolled out over the next few days to users around the world, said … Read more

Symantec is finalizing a deal in which it will buy the security unit of VeriSign to the tune of about $1.3 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.

If it goes through, the deal would give Symantec ownership of VeriSign's authentication business, the Journal's sources say.

The acquisition would further expand Symantec's reach into the encryption business. The news comes just a few weeks after the security giant announced it planned to buy PGP and GuardianEdge, two encryption companies, for $300 million and $70 million respectively.

At the end of April, VeriSign reported revenue of $264 … Read more

Google plans to offer encrypted search next week, it announced Friday in disclosing an embarrassing Street View privacy gaffe.

Google's Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, hinted that such a feature was coming Thursday during a question and answer session at Google's annual stockholder meeting. But the company must have decided it could no longer wait following the disclosure that it had improperly collected Internet usage data from Wi-Fi hot spots as part of its Google Street View program.

"Earlier this year, we encrypted Gmail for all our users, and next week we … Read more

The software world is full of PDF utilities from the four corners of the globe. PSW-soft's Guaranteed PDF Decrypter (GuaPDF) is an example; its developers' page is called Russian Password Crackers, which sounds like something out of the Cold War but in fact is a group specializing in cryptosecurity. GuaPDF is designed to remove various restrictions from PDF files, up to 256-bit key encryption, and to decrypt 40-bit key passwords of any length in any language. It can also harness the processing power of Nvidia CUDA-capable graphics cards to accelerate decryption.

GuaPDF downloads as a ZIP file but opens … Read more

There is a logical argument to be made that tooling for infrastructure and application management is where most of the money will be made when it comes to cloud computing. It's not that cloud providers won't make money, but that the cost of entry to the market is so high that there will be many more consumers than providers, making high-quality tooling a necessity.

I spoke to EnStratus co-founder and CTO George Reese about what customers are looking for. EnStratus provides a suite of tools for managing cloud infrastructure. This includes support for the provisioning, management, and monitoring of applications in multiple public and private clouds.

Reese told me the company is seeing medium to large companies examining the public cloud as a deployment possibility for some apps and they want to do it in a way that they can use their beta code in future applications. But their main concerns come down to security and control.

The public cloud is a trade-off, requiring users to decide what they want to give up in order to take advantage of the computing capabilities. The thing people don't want to lose control over is the data.

According to Reese, there are three control areas that users should look for when considering cloud deployments. … Read more

PDF files hold so much information these days that it's inevitable that some of it will be worth protecting from prying eyes. A PDF encryption utility, like GetPDF's Encryptor Decryptor 3.0, can help you keep your files secure. It will not only protect your PDFs with passwords but will also allow or disallow a wide range of access options and changes, such as printing, copying, signing, merging, assembling, filling, or extracting files. It also decrypts PDFs, with the right password, and verifies the passwords of protected files.

This tool's interface is well-laid-out, with clear field descriptors … Read more

Quite a bit of hype surrounds Square, the mobile payment processing service founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. But mobile payment processing is hardly a new concept, as companies like Symbol (now owned by Motorola) have long offering a wide array of devices.

The big deal is not the concept, but the fact that you can turn your iPhone or other mobile device into an on-demand payment processing service.

I spoke to Tom Patterson, chief security officer of MagTek, a provider of electronic devices for the secure transfer of payment data, to understand the implications of this new wave of … Read more

If you've had an iPhone for a long time and you have grown to depend on it then you should know that iPhone backups are important. This week I'll focus on some good tips about the automatic backups created in iTunes each time you sync your iPhone or iPod Touch. All of the tips apply, whether you are using Mac OS X or Windows.

Speed up your backups

If you own an iPhone, you probably enjoy the convenience of using the built-in camera for both still and video photography. I know I do, but my over enthusiastic use … Read more