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Showing posts from November, 2009

Blackboard (in)Security

The University recently recently paid for a vulnerability assessment and penetration test, which came back saying that, apart from a few minor things, everything was fine and secure. I take issue with this finding for several reasons, most of which I won't go into here. Now, I haven't actually seen the report produced by the company, but I have had verbal reports from the IT technicians that 'nothing serious' was found. The University uses a hateful product called Blackboard as a Virtual Learning Management System. This is a web-based application allowing access to learning materials, grades, etc., from anywhere in the world. The problem is that it doesn't use an encrypted connection and uses a simple Session ID cookie to assert that you are an authenticated user. There are two problems with this. Firstly, if I capture your cookie and send it with my HTTP request, then I will be treated as you and can see or do anything as you. Secondly, and much more importantly

Secret Sharing Algorithm for Protecting Files in the Cloud

Data stored in the cloud can be compromised or lost (see my previous post ). So, we have to come up with a way to secure those files. We can encrypt them before storing them in the cloud, which sorts out the disclosure aspects. However, what if the data is lost due to some catastrophe befalling the cloud service provider? We could store it on more than one cloud service and encrypt it before we send it off. Each of them will have the same file. What if we use an insecure, easily guessable password to protect the file, or the same one to protect all files? I have often thought that secret sharing algorithms could be employed to good effect in these circumstances instead. What are secret sharing algorithms? They are algorithms that will share a secret between several parties, such that none of them can know the secret without the help of others. Either all or a subset of them will need to get together and put their parts together to obtain the original secret. A simplistic solution can