Security Analysis of Threema

A group of Swiss researchers have published an impressive security analysis of Threema.

We provide an extensive cryptographic analysis of Threema, a Swiss-based encrypted messaging application with more than 10 million users and 7000 corporate customers. We present seven different attacks against the protocol in three different threat models. As one example, we present a cross-protocol attack which breaks authentication in Threema and which exploits the lack of proper key separation between different sub-protocols. As another, we demonstrate a compression-based side-channel attack that recovers users’ long-term private keys through observation of the size of Threema encrypted back-ups. We discuss remediations for our attacks and draw three wider lessons for developers of secure protocols…

January 19, 2023
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Researchers’ Quantum Threat Debunked, RSA Safe for Now

In a paper published late last month, 24 Chinese researchers suggested that RSA-2048 encryption could be broken using a quantum computer with 372 physical quantum bits. Cryptographer Bruce Schneier drew attention to the paper [PDF] last week in a blog post, noting that IBM recently announced a 433-qubit quantum computer, far exceeding the researchers’ stated […]

The post Researchers’ Quantum Threat Debunked, RSA Safe for Now appeared first on eSecurityPlanet.

January 10, 2023
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ChatGPT-Written Malware

I don’t know how much of a thing this will end up being, but we are seeing ChatGPT-written malware in the wild.

…within a few weeks of ChatGPT going live, participants in cybercrime forums—­some with little or no coding experience­—were using it to write software and emails that could be used for espionage, ransomware, malicious spam, and other malicious tasks.

“It’s still too early to decide whether or not ChatGPT capabilities will become the new favorite tool for participants in the Dark Web,” company researchers wrote. “However, the cybercriminal community has already shown significant interest and are jumping into this latest trend to generate malicious code.”…

January 10, 2023
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