A collection of links to round out the year:<\/p>\n
The story is actually much more complicated than one can believe, with a still unclear sequence of changes in the software indicating that others, possibly a foreign government, took advantage of the NSA backdoor to compromise these systems. Green points out that this makes very clear the problem with government-mandated backdoors: even if you trust the government, they make it much easier for others to take advantage of the security problems they have introduced:<\/p>\n
One of the most serious concerns we raise during these meetings is the possibility that encryption backdoors could be subverted. Specifically, that a backdoor intended for law enforcement could somehow become a backdoor for people who we don’t trust to read our messages. Normally when we talk about this, we’re concerned about failures in storage of things like escrow keys. What this Juniper vulnerability illustrates is that the danger is much broader and more serious than that.<\/p>\n
The problem with cryptographic backdoors isn’t that they’re the only way that an attacker can break into our cryptographic systems. It’s merely that they’re one of the best. They take care of the hard work, the laying of plumbing and electrical wiring, so attackers can simply walk in and change the drapes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n
- If you just can’t get enough of my and other people’s views on string theory, Ben Winterhalter has a piece on the Jstor blog<\/a>, telling the story of his attempts to figure out what’s going on with extra dimensions.<\/li>\n
- Among the many great articles at Quanta, I can recommend this one<\/a>, which features my Columbia colleague Wei Zhang.\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Happy New Year!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A collection of links to round out the year: The Seminaire Bourbaki talks this January look unusually interesting. Luckily I’ll be in Paris at that time. For an end of year present, Jacob Lurie has posted a version of his … Continue reading