1210, 2010

Thoughts about Secure Communication and Wiretapping

René Pfeiffer/ October 12, 2010/ Communication

Secure communication is a very important cornerstone of modern network design and corporate infrastructure. The need to communicate securely is part of everyday life. Businesses, political groups, individuals, governments, non-governmental organisations, and many others use secure communication. The basic idea is that you put a decent portion of trust into the way you exchange messages. Typically the message is only seen by the sender and the recipient. Many take this property of message exchange for granted, but you have to use suitable protocols to meet this goal. Secure communication protocols usually use encryption or steganography to protect and hide the transported messages. Anyone intercepting the data transmission must not be able to decode the original message(s) sent. This is the idea, and when designing secure protocols there is no way around it. Some use

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1906, 2010

Call for Papers – Reminder

René Pfeiffer/ June 19, 2010/ Schedule

Our Call for Papers is still running until 31 July 2010. We already have some very interesting talk and workshop submissions. Two experts cover the black magic of the last mile and network backbones. Clearly this is critical infrastructure and is often neglected when implementing security measures. Few administrators put their firewalls in front of the ISP’s modem. There are attacks against infrastructure. Wireless networks illustrate this problem very well. Strangely when it comes to wired networks people think of them as more secure. True, wired connections cannot be accessed through thin air, but this doesn’t immunise them against threats on the infrastructure level. Routing protocols, administrative interfaces, unpatched firmware, bugs, noisy broadcasts and network design errors can lead to a fertile ground for a compromised network well before your firewall kicks in. So

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