Our friends from Radboud University made the news again last week, when they got the Best Practical Paper Award at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. The most interesting part of this is the background, of course. NXP tried to stop the researchers from publishing the results of their work, and they failed, after […]
Corporate Communication in the Internet age
Another piece of Internet fun today. Bruce Schneier has promoted Net1 to the doghouse (i.e., vendors of cryptographic snake oil and other phony products). This surprised me a bit, since Net1 owns Prizm, one of Trusted Logic’s competitors on smart card operating systems. Not that this brings me to like them, but the doghouse is […]
Application store competition becomes hot
I recently found interesting the fact that Vodafone planned to launch a multi-platform application store, which I believe introduces real competitions in these stores. Before that, all other application stores were mono-platform, including Qualcomm’s, of coure dedicated to the Brew platform. This particular application store is far from new, and it has been quite a […]
How easy it is to be uniquely identified
Here is another scary thought brought by Bruce Schneier. Just knowing in which block you live and work is likely to identify you uniquely. I have just browed the paper, and it looks very interesting. The scary part is that I am about to start using a new electric bike and a GPS-eneabled phone. This […]
E-mail and security hickups
Yesterday, I received an e-mail from somebody at a major card manufacturer warning me about USB keys. Initially, I thought it was spam, but I looked at it anyway, and the mail happened to be signed by the guy in the From field, and there was no link to a page that could have infected […]
Can their users’ trust save operators?
Telecom operators (mobile and Internet, forget about fixed line) are being attacked on all sides. Where Nokia used to be their worst threat, they now have Apple, with their business model that makes them pay while keeping a complete control over their users and their applications. Where they used to provde all basic services to […]
On the road again
You may have noted that I have switched back to this blog’s original title, On the road to Bandol. This original title comes from the fact that Bandol was the codename chosen by Sun for the Java Card release that became 3.0, combined with the fact that, for me, Bandol is quite close to home; […]
Real competition on app stores
Seeing one phone manufacturer after another announce their application store was starting to become boring, until Vodafone announced their own app store. Of course, the obvious reason why this is different is that Vodafone is an operator, not a phone manufacturer. This means that we are going out of boring silos, with a more interesting […]
Software vendors: Liable or irresponsible?
As of today, when your software stops working, or when a blatant security hole in a product puts your personal data in the hands of an ill-intentioned pirate, there is nothing you can do: software comes without any real warranty, and you are just stuck with it and its problems. This is of course absolutely […]
Design for security
There is an ongoing compeition in England about combining design and security to improve the security of mobile phones, and more precisely, to limit the stealing of phones. This sounds like a wonderful idea, because design can make attacks unpractical and/or more difficult to implement, therefore making a stolen phone less valuable. I can’t wait […]