osk-e3

Canon camera encryption cracked

There's a new reason to take note of a Russian programmer who rose to modest fame with his detainment in the United States in 2001: his work to help crack encryption used in Canon cameras.

The programmer and encryption expert is Dmitry Sklyarov, and his company, Elcomsoft, has found a vulnerability in Canon's OSK-E3 system for ensuring that photos such as those used in police evidence-gathering haven't been tampered with.

The result is that the company can create doctored photos that the technology thinks are authentic. To illustrate its point, it released a few doctored photos that it says passes the Canon integrity checks.

"The vulnerability discovered by ElcomSoft questions the authenticity of all Canon signed photographic evidence and published photos and effectively proves the entire Canon Original Data Security system useless," the company said in a statement. Sklyarov presented the findings at the Confidence 2.0 conference last week.

Canon didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. … Read more