binaryslate

The Guardian is reporting that the new UK Passports have been cracked.

“The Home Office has adopted a very high encryption technology called 3DES - that is, to a military-level data-encryption standard times three. So they are using strong cryptography to prevent conversations between the passport and the reader being eavesdropped, but they are then breaking one of the fundamental principles of encryption by using non-secret information actually published in the passport to create a ’secret key’. That is the equivalent of installing a solid steel front door to your house and then putting the key under the mat.”

I’m glad something like this has come out, i’ve been an opponent of this and ID cards since they were first mentioned. I frankly wouldn’t trust the government to be a ble to file some word documents securely let alone keep track of my biometric information, or be able to cope with 60 million citizen’s biometrics.

Who even came up with the system? The first rule of encryption is obviously to keep the key secure, not to write it on the document in plain text!

I try to regularly clean up my machine, and it’s just a pain to clear the whitespace securely. The Windows File Shredder provides a nice helpful utility to dispose of unwanted files securely.

It’s a simple windows batch file you can leave on your desktop, a simple drag and drop of a file onto the script will dispose of it once and for all.

It uses the SDelete utility from Sysinternals (plenty of other great apps there too).


@echo off
echo .* * *W A R N I N G * * *
echo .
echo .The File(s)/Folders(s) Will Be Permanently Deleted!
echo .
echo .Press CTRL-C to Abort and Terminate Batch Job Or...
echo .
pause
sdelete -p 4 -s %1
pause


Save the file as “shred.bat” on your desktop right next to your Recycling Bin. Now just drag and drop those sensitive files onto the icon to make them disappear forever!

tip: lifehacker

Gatwick lets no-ticket/no-passport 12-year-old onto a plane

To fool such a system, it takes a 12-year-old boy, as reported by newspaper FAZ (in German). He managed to get onboard a plane at Gatwick airport in London (at the origin city of the planned attacks) during the ongoing high-alert phase — without even possessing a passport of ticket!

I’m not too surprised really, we came back from Florida on Friday and we were made to dump all our liquids and gels from our hand luggage. One of our party had inadvertently left a bottle of perfume in her bag, she went through 3 bag screenings and they didn’t spot it, she found it herself when we landed!

Let’s face it, how much checking can you do?