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Security

Man-In-the-Middle Vulnerability For SSL and TLS 170

Posted by Soulskill from the alphabet-soup dept.
imbaczek writes "The SSL 3.0+ and TLS 1.0+ protocols are vulnerable to a set of related attacks which allow a man-in-the-middle (MITM) operating at or below the TCP layer to inject a chosen plaintext prefix into the encrypted data stream, often without detection by either end of the connection. This is possible because an 'authentication gap' exists during the renegotiation process, at which the MitM may splice together disparate TLS connections in a completely standards-compliant way. This represents a serious security defect for many or all protocols which run on top of TLS, including HTTPS."

Comment Re:Openness to ideas and creativity (Score 1) 808

by aibohphobia (#29987168) Attached to: Why a High IQ Doesn't Mean You're Smart

I had a similar experience, except my story has an amusing twist. :)

I transferred to a new school in 10th grade. For some reason they moved me to the honors chemistry section after the first day of classes, so I missed out on seat selection. The only available seat was in the back of the room behind the normal desks -- at a lab table with the "cool" kids. All semester long the cool kids complained about getting C's and D's. I'm not one for bad news, so I didn't ask the teacher about my grades; I just assumed I was getting a C too.

At the end of the semester I went to see the teacher in private. She walked over to a box beside the door labeled "quiz return" (no idea how I managed to miss that). The box contained all of my quizzes and tests from the semester. She handed them to me and told me I was the first person to ever ace her class!

The papers had my names on them, so it's possible that everyone in the class knew that I was the one setting the curve. So maybe the key isn't in hiding the fact that you're setting the curve. Maybe the cool kids only get upset if you make a big deal about it.

Comment WTF: slashdot popups? (Score 1) 583

by aibohphobia (#29913997) Attached to: Who Installs the Most Crapware?

[I usually post AC, but I'm making an exception for this.]

Did anyone else get a pop-up from hardware.slashdot.org with a 100x100 image hosted on suitesmart.com saying "We are conducting a research survey on this site. You will be invited to participate when you leave. Please do not close this window."

Is that some kind of joke related to the story?
Security

Arbitrary Code Execution With "ldd" 184

Posted by kdawson from the so-easy dept.
pkrumins writes "The ldd utility is more vulnerable than you think. It's frequently used by programmers and system administrators to determine the dynamic library dependencies of executables. Sounds pretty innocent, right? Wrong! It turns out that running ldd on an executable can result in executing arbitrary code. This article details how such executable can be constructed and comes up with a social engineering scenario that may lead to system compromise. I researched this subject thoroughly and found that it's almost completely undocumented."
Caldera

SCO Terminates Darl McBride 458

Posted by CmdrTaco from the end-of-an-era dept.
bpechter writes "Linux Today reports SCO has terminated Darl McBride and linked to the SCO 8K SEC report. The report found also at the SCO site and states: 'the Company has eliminated the Chief Executive Officer and President positions and consequently terminated Darl McBride.'"
Operating Systems

Linux Kernel 2.6.31 Released 374

Posted by CmdrTaco from the download-compile-reboot-repeat dept.
diegocgteleline.es writes "The Linux kernel v2.6.31 has been released. Besides the desktop improvements and USB 3.0 support mentioned some days ago, there is an equivalent of FUSE for character devices that can be used for proxying OSS sound through ALSA, new tools for using hardware performance counters, readahead improvements, ATI Radeon KMS, Intel's Wireless Multicomm 3200 support, gcov support, a memory checker and a memory leak detector, a reimplementation of inotify and dnotify on top of a new filesystem notification infrastructure, btrfs improvements, support for IEEE 802.15.4, IPv4 over Firewire, new drivers and small improvements. The full list of changes can be found here."
Education

Simple, Portable Physics Simulations 145

Posted by timothy from the for-kids-and-other-humans dept.
ttsiod writes "I want to 'lure' my nephews/nieces towards Science and Engineering (to whatever extent that's possible, in the age of consoles). To that end, I have coded simple physics simulations, like falling snow, exploding fireworks, and 1D/2D wave simulations. My efforts are here, in the form of portable SDL mini-programs (GPL code, compilable under Windows, Linux, Free/Net/OpenBSD, Mac OS/X and basically every OS with GCC and SDL). Try them out, and do offer any suggestions on other programs that can trigger scientific interest in young minds. Myself, I am teaching them Python, so that they can code 'fireworks' on their own."
Security

Local Privilege Escalation On All Linux Kernels 595

Posted by timothy from the uriah-deems-it-scary dept.
QuesarVII writes "Tavis Ormandy and Julien Tinnes have discovered a severe security flaw in all 2.4 and 2.6 kernels since 2001 on all architectures. 'Since it leads to the kernel executing code at NULL, the vulnerability is as trivial as it can get to exploit: an attacker can just put code in the first page that will get executed with kernel privileges.'"
Mozilla

Firefox 3.6 Alpha 1 Released 212

Posted by timothy from the waiting-in-the-wings dept.
An anonymous reader writes with word of the release of the first alpha of Firefox 3.6, "intended for developers and testers only." "As with Firefox 3.5, there are improvements to the performance; pages render faster, and pages with JavaScript code run much faster with the new Tracemonkey engine. Although this Firefox version carries the code name 'Namoroka' Alpha 1, it is also currently referred to as Firefox.next. And like other Firefox Alphas, it does not bear the Firefox logo. This release uses the Gecko 1.9.2 engine and will likely include several interface improvements in later versions, such as new graphical tab-switching behavior, which was removed from 3.5 with Beta 2." Update: 08/09 03:54 GMT by T : Read more at InaTux.com.
Data Storage

Garbage Collection Algorithms Coming For SSDs 156

Posted by Soulskill from the take-out-the-tash dept.
MojoKid writes "A common concern with the current crop of Solid State Drives is the performance penalty associated with block-rewriting. Flash memory is comprised of cells that usually contain 4KB pages that are arranged in blocks of 512KB. When a cell is unused, data can be written to it relatively quickly. But if a cell already contains some data, even if it fills only a single page in the block, the entire block must be re-written. This means that whatever data is already present in the block must be read, then it must be combined or replaced, and the entire block is then re-written. This process takes much longer than simply writing data straight to an empty block. This isn't a concern on fresh, new SSDs, but over time, as files are written, moved, deleted, or replaced, many blocks are a left holding what is essentially orphaned or garbage data, and their long-term performance degrades because of it. To mitigate this problem, virtually all SSD manufacturers have incorporated, or soon will incorporate, garbage collection schemes into their SSD firmware which actively seek out and remove the garbage data. OCZ, in combination with Indilinx, is poised to release new firmware for their entire line-up of Vertex Series SSDs that performs active garbage collection while the drives are idle, in order to restore performance to like-new condition, even on a severely 'dirtied' drive."
Programming

Bjarne Stroustrup On Concepts, C++0x 346

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the down-and-out-but-not-over dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Danny Kalev has an interview with Bjarne Stroustrup about the failure of concepts, the technical issues of concepts, whether the ISO committee's days are over, and whether C++ is at a dead-end. 'I don't think that concepts were doomed to fail. Also, I don't think concepts were trying to fix many things or to transform C++ into an almost new language. They were introduced to do one thing: provide direct language support to the by-far dominant use of templates: generic programming. They were intended to allow direct expression of what people already state in comments, in design documents, and in documentation. Every well-designed template is written with a notion of what is required from its arguments. For good code, those requirements are documented (think of the standard's requirements tables). That is, today most templates are designed using an informal notion of concepts.'"
Graphics

AMD's OpenCL Allows GPU Code To Run On X86 CPUs 176

Posted by timothy from the now-that's-something-like dept.
eldavojohn writes "Two blog posts from AMD are causing a stir in the GPU community. AMD has created and released the industry's first OpenCL which allows developers to code against AMD's graphics API (normally only used for their GPUs) and run it on any x86 CPU. Now, as a developer, you can divide the workload between the two as you see fit instead of having to commit to either GPU or CPU. Ars has more details."
Security

XML Library Flaw — Sun, Apache, GNOME Affected 140

Posted by Soulskill from the finding-fast-fixes-for-flaws dept.
bednarz writes with this excerpt from Network World: "Vulnerabilities discovered in XML libraries from Sun, the Apache Software Foundation, the Python Software Foundation and the GNOME Project could result in successful denial-of-service attacks on applications built with them, according to Codenomicon. The security vendor found flaws in XML parsers that made it fairly easy to cause a DoS attack, corruption of data, and delivery of a malicious payload using XML-based content. Codenomicon has shared its findings with industry and the open source groups, and a number of recommendations and patches for the XML-related vulnerabilities are expected to be made available Wednesday. In addition, a general security advisory is expected to be published by the Computer Emergency Response Team in Finland (CERT-FI)."
Security

Null-Prefix SSL Attacks Enabled In New sslsniff 48

Posted by timothy from the ready-or-not-here-it-comes dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Moxie Marlinspike, who recently published new attacks on SSL at Defcon 17, seems to have released the new version of sslsniff which supports these attacks. While the release appears to coincide with a patch from Mozilla, every product that uses the Microsoft CryptoAPI is still vulnerable, including Internet Explorer and Outlook. The new version of sslsniff also supports built-in modes for hijacking software auto-updates that depend on SSL, and apparently includes techniques for defeating OCSP as well — making the elimination of existing null-prefix certificates difficult."
Data Storage

Intel Confirms Data Corruption Bug, Halts New SSDs 137

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the solid-state-death dept.
CWmike writes "Intel has confirmed that its new consumer-class X25-M and X18-M solid state-disk drives (SSDs) suffer from data corruption issues and said it has pulled back shipments to resellers. The X25-M (2.5-inch) and X18-M (1.8-inch) SSDs are based on a joint venture with Micron and used that company's 34-nanometer lithography technology. That process allows for a denser, higher capacity product that brings with it a lower price tag than Intel's previous offerings, which were based on 50-nanometer lithography technology. Intel says the data corruption problem occurs only if a user sets up a BIOS password on the 34-nanometer SSD, then disables or changes the password and reboots the computer. When that happens, the SSD becomes inoperable and the data on it is irretrievable. This is not the first time Intel's X25-M and X18-M SSDs have suffered from firmware bugs. The company's first generation of drives suffered from fragmentation issues resulting in performance degradation over time. Intel issued a firmware upgrade as a fix."

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