encryption

A strong password is one of the best defenses against a security breach, but managing all the different passwords on all of your documents can be a real pain. That's where Password Encryption Analyzer Free comes into play. The program offers a way to scan all of your documents to check for and recover passwords, but it came up short when we put it to the test.

The program's user interface is as basic as it gets. On the left side, you can select the locations for the program to scan: Computer, Documents, Local Drives. From there, radio … Read more

The security add-on for Firefox called HTTPS Everywhere (download) that forces HTTPS encryption on numerous popular Web sites has graduated to its first stable release, about a year after it was released into public beta.

The tool does not let you force HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) willy-nilly on Web sites. Instead, it includes a series of rules that supports sites that allow HTTPS encryption. The Electronic Frontier Foundation said in the blog post announcing the release that it encompasses more than 1,000 popular sites, including Google Search, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, bit.ly, GMX, Wordpress.com blogs, The New … Read more

Ever since its introduction in OS X 10.3, Apple has maintained its FileVault encryption technology for securing home folders in an encrypted disk image that mounts when users log into their systems. Apple's only major changes to this technology were in Leopard with the implementation of Time Machine, where sparsebundle disk images were used to facilitate incremental backups. In OS X 10.7 Apple has introduced a full revision of FileVault, that approaches file encryption from a completely different standpoint.

With FileVault 2, Apple has done away with the standalone encrypted disk images in OS X, and replaced … Read more

USB flash drives are easy to lose if you don't keep track of them. In part three of our "What to do with your USB flash drive" series, we'll show you how to encrypt your USB flash drive so that if it gets lost or stolen, its contents will be safe and sound:

Encrypt it Step 1: Download and install TrueCrypt.

Step 2: After you've inserted an empty USB flash drive into your computer, launch TrueCrypt and click on the Create Volume button.

Step 3: At the TrueCrypt Volume Creation Wizard screen, select Encrypt a … Read more

The U.S. Department of Justice is determined to make sure that a case in Colorado will set a legal precedent allowing it to force Americans accused of crimes to decrypt their computers' hard drives.

Phil Dubois is equally determined not to let that happen. The Colorado Springs-based attorney is representing Ramona Fricosu, accused of a mortgage scam, who is refusing to divulge the passphrase to an encrypted laptop found in her bedroom.

Dubois, who specializes in criminal defense and Internet law, says requiring Fricosu to decrypt the hard drive would be a clear violation of his client's Fifth … Read more

The Colorado prosecution of a woman accused of a mortgage scam will test whether the government can punish you for refusing to disclose your encryption passphrase.

The Obama administration has asked a federal judge to order the defendant, Ramona Fricosu, to decrypt an encrypted laptop that police found in her bedroom during a raid of her home.

Because Fricosu has opposed the proposal, this could turn into a precedent-setting case. No U.S. appeals court appears to have ruled on whether such an order would be legal or not under the U.S. Constitution's Fifth Amendment, which broadly protects … Read more

With millions of implantable medical devices in the U.S. alone, and some 300,000 more people receiving them worldwide every year, the need to protect these wireless devices from being hacked is increasingly urgent.

Wearers might soon be better protected, thanks to new work out of MIT and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, so long as they don't mind walking around in invisible shields.

The system the research team will be proposing at the Association for Computing Machinery's Sigcomm conference in Toronto this August uses a jamming transmitter small enough to be worn as a watch or necklace.

The device would essentially be authorized to access the implant and send encrypted instructions to the transmitter (the team calls this the "shield"), which would in turn decode the encryption and relay the instructions to the implant.

Using a device that is separate from the medical implant is key for a few reasons: it allows for post-encryption in devices that are already implanted; it enables authorized emergency responders to simply remove the patient's shield in the event of emergencies; and it doesn't require the size of the implants to increase to accommodate and power the shield.

The new system expands on a technique recently developed at Stanford University that allows for sending and receiving signals in the same frequency band. In typical wireless technology, using the same frequency band interferes with the signal, but by employing three antennas positioned precise distances apart, one band can now be used.… Read more

A Russian computer forensics company, ElcomSoft, says it has developed a toolkit that can help law enforcement agencies quickly access encrypted file systems on Apple's iPhone.

ElcomSoft's toolkit is an important development as smartphone security and privacy have become a hot-button issue.

Last month, researchers discovered that the iPhone was tracking users' locations as they moved from place to place. The information was stored in an unencrypted file on the iPhone, as well as in iTunes backups. After privacy advocates complained that the iPhone was tracking user movements, Apple responded saying that it had no desire to track … Read more

Popular third-party password manager LastPass revealed yesterday that it may well have been hacked and that some e-mail usernames and master passwords may have been stolen. Does this mean it's time to migrate to another password manager, or even abandon the entire concept of online password management for a pen-and-paper solution?

Given the facts of the situation from LastPass' blog post explaining what happened, I'd say no to giving LastPass the boot, and definitely not to abandoning digital password management for a "little black book."

Leaving a paper trail is a horrendous idea for two reasons. … Read more