Friday, April 3, 2009

Three Security maps in FreeMind and Flash

Here are the Mind Maps that I constructed to help me sift through information on three security topics from last year - an improved attack on A5/1, the Cold Boot Attack, and the Debian Crypto flaw. In each case there is a considerably more detail and references in the Mind Maps than the posts that were derived from them.

In February 2008 an improved attack on A5/1 was announced, the cipher used in the encryption of GSM mobile phones. While A5/1 is not considered strong, the new attack claimed faster recovery of keys using less assumption and data. This Mind Map provides an overview of the issues and what was claimed.

Also in February last year, the Cold Boot Attack was devised by Princeton researchers. This Mind Map gives an overview on what was claimed, what were the reactions and a lot of opinion on how this attack came about. In short, many professionals knew the attack could work in principle but it took an actual demonstration to convince them thoroughly.

In May 2008 Luciano Bello discovered a flaw in the random number generator of OpenSSL, which lead to the discovery that the Debian Etch distribution had been producing weak (public) keys for well-known protocols such as SSL and SSH over the previous 18 months. This Mind Map provides an annotated set of links on the topic.

Related Posts


No comments: