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BlackBerry wins U.S. government security approval

Research In Motion has been butting heads with foreign governments over its tight security, but its latest BlackBerry 6 OS has won approval from the U.S. government for those same standards.

RIM announced today that its BlackBerry 6 operating system is now FIPS 140-2 certified. FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) is a series of standards set up by the U.S. government to ensure that computer products meet certain high-level security requirements. The standard is used by government agencies, regulated industries, and other organizations that store and send data dealing with sensitive information.

The FIPS 140-2 standard (PDF) specifically … Read more

Crypto pioneers differ on cloud-computing risks

SAN FRANCISCO--A group of pioneers in the security field, whose work in encryption is used to protect Internet data and communications every day, spoke about the state of security at a cryptographer's panel at the RSA security conference on Tuesday.

They tackled various questions about cyber security in general, but the topic that dominated was cloud computing.

"Cloud computing is a challenge to security, but one that can be overcome," said Whitfield Diffie, chief security officer at Sun Microsystems. "I believe cloud computing will get to (the point) where no real program...will be done anymore … Read more

ShoZu's hieroglyphics prove you're human

Forget Descartes and his classically profound notion of human existence, "Cogito ergo sum." These days, cracking a short cryptograph is what proves hominid status.

Assailed by several DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks, ShoZu (review), a mobile and Web media-sharing service, switched from the 6 to 8 character authentication system to a series of encoded glyphs you have to translate in order to pass the I'm-a-human qualification required of ShoZu account holders.

While uploading and downloading media feeds between the mobile phone and Web doesn't seem like such a security risk, ShoZu CEO Mark Bole explains … Read more