Podcasting What Geeks Really Want To Hear

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Hello all – the good news is that steady progress on getting my f*&#ing Master’s degree done is being made. I’m hoping to be done with my project in mid to late January. At that point, the podcast should be back in swing, as working on my thesis paper will require a lot less of my time than the project.

At any rate, to all of our listeners, we wish you the happiest of holidays and a fantastic new year!

posted by Nem W Schlecht at 13:29 in General,News    
Thursday, December 6, 2007

From:  http://www.hackaday.com/2007/12/02/wireless-keyboards-easily-cracked/

The “encryption” used on each regular keystroke involves XORing the key against a random one byte value determined during the initial sync with the receiver. So, if you sniff the handshake, you can decrypt the keystrokes. You really don’t have to though; there are only 256 possible encryption keys. Using a dictionary file you can check all possible keys and determine the correct one after only receiving 20-50 keystrokes

What I don’t get is this – who thinks this is good encryption for the real world? Yeah, an XOR is a nice and easy obfuscation, but is it not encryption!

As an industry, we really have to get our heads out of asses on this. Wireless communication is being used more and more in production environments and this shit is often way too easy to hack.

posted by Nem W Schlecht at 10:54 in General,News    

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