
War On Encryption Ep. 2: Jake Williams

In this episode we talk with Jake Williams who is the Principal Consultant at Rendition Infosec and a SANS course author and instructor. We discuss some of the workarounds available to the FBI to circumvent Apple’s iPhone encryption, after the announcement the FBI dropped the case against Apple attempting to force them to assist in the decryption of Syed Farouk. We also discuss the potential of backdoors being deployed as part of an auto update process and the potential of this attack vector being forced by a government agency to weaken device security and its potential impact. In addition we discuss how to frame the crypto debate to the general public and business leaders in ways they understand, using John Oliver’s comical spin on the topic as an example.

War On Encryption Ep. 1: Richard Stiennon

In this episode we talk with Richard Stiennon who is the Chief Research Analyst for IT-Harvest and author of two books on cyberwar. We discuss the challenges that businesses face from government demands to weaken encryption, provide backdoors and otherwise weaken security controls. In addition we highlight the challenges executives and boards face, as they are caught in the middle between demands by consumers for stronger privacy and security controls, and those of law enforcement to weaken these controls to target terrorist and criminal communications.