Monday, 3 October 2016

Russian blogger Anton Nosik convicted of extremism

Russian blogger and entrepreneur Anton Nosik has been found guilty of extremism by a Russian court over comments about Syria.

Facebook Messenger 'slims down' for old phones

Facebook announces a "slimmed down" version of its Messenger app for countries where older smartphones and slower net speeds are more common.

Toyota launches 'baby' robot for companionship

A palm-sized robot that can hold conversations will go on sale in Japan next year, developer Toyota announces.

Fears of massive net attacks as code shared online

Computer code used to mount one of the biggest web attacks ever seen has been released online.

Saturday, 1 October 2016

Firefox blocks websites with vulnerable encryption keys

To protect users from cryptographic attacks that can compromise secure web connections, the popular Firefox browser will block access to HTTPS servers that use weak Diffie-Hellman keys.

Diffie-Hellman is a key exchange protocol that is slowly replacing the widely used RSA key agreement for the TLS  (Transport Layer Security) protocol. Unlike RSA, Diffie-Hellman can be used with TLS's ephemeral modes, which provide forward secrecy -- a property that prevents the decryption of previously captured traffic if the key is cracked at a later time.

However, in May 2015 a team of researchers devised a downgrade attack that could compromise the encryption connection between browsers and servers if those servers supported DHE_EXPORT, a version of Diffie-Hellman key exchange imposed on exported cryptographic systems by the U.S. National Security Agency in the 1990s and which limited the key size to 512 bits. In May 2015 around 7 percent of websites on the internet were vulnerable to the attack, which was dubbed LogJam.

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You sent how much?!

Business email fraud is on the rise, with fraudsters persuading staff to pay bogus invoices and make wire transfers under false pretences. Can tech foil the fraudsters?

Pepper robot learns to catch ball in a cup and other news

BBC Click's Lara Lewington looks at some of the best of the week's technology news.