A few words of praise for mitmproxy.  This useful tool lets you monitor TLS-encrypted communications from a device, provided you can install a trusted Certificate Authority (CA) key on it (and provided the application on the device accepts TLS certificates signed by this CA key). The idea is that TCP traffic from the device, and HTTP traffic in particular, is routed through mitmproxy.  Whenever… View More

Recently, Mathy Vanhoef from the University of Leuven published, with his supervisor Frank Piessens, a Key Re-initialisation Attack on WPA/WPA2.  This was significant because these standards are so widely used, and also because there were proofs of strength for the the protocol they attacked (in models which consequently are shown to be inadequate). WPA and WPA2 are very… View More

Bitcoin has attracted a lot of interest recently, due to its recent high value.  Here we give a quick overview of how it works. In the bitcoin system, transactions are stored in a distributed e-ledger, the blockchain, which is hard to forge for reasons we'll explore shortly. A… View More

A not-too-testing crossword clue I spotted in the current edition of The Week: Italian city's good for English code-breaker… View More

A recent news story has been the decision on Tuesday last week of a US attorney judge, after a hearing brought by the FBI, to place an order on Apple Inc. to assist in the recovery of data from an iPhone relating to the investigation into the shooting by Syed Rizwan Farook… View More

The BBC reported this week that Dell computers have not only been shipped installed with a Certificate Authority public key issued by Dell with name (CN=) eDellRoot – but bizarrely also with matching private key. The problem has been observed… View More