Call for Papers: CryptoCon16 – Patch Me If You Can

Wed, 09 Mar 2016 20:52:05 +0000

For the the fourth time Leipzig Hackerspace sublab e.V. and Bündnis Privacy Leipzig e.V. invite everybody to our security conference CryptoCon16 themed “Patch me if you can”. Ehe event will take place from May 19 until May 22, 2016, at our location in Leipzig-Plagwitz (Westwerk).
For four days, we will focus on:

cryptography
practical approaches to encryption
decentralized communication infrastructure
law and administrative questions
privacy
open hardware
hacktivism
attacks on IT and communication systems
security solutions and protocols

In 2013 Edward Snowdens uncoverings made our worst nightmares come true. Federal and Intelligence surveillance these days even outperforms our most pessimistic predictions.
Private companies housing tremendous amounts of data, of collected with users conscent. Legal limbo often makes them becoming sheriffs deputy, when request by government agency come in.
We were promised, that all this was about to change, one will get to the bottom of it. But as of now: Nothing happened. Nothing changed.
Even worse, instead of making the intelligence agencies subject to massive reforms, build up an effective federal control, restrict cooperations with agencies from overseas, restrict private data aggregation, federal surveillance will even be expanded.
Mindestspeicherfrist (data retention, from 2017) in Germany, permanent state of emergency in France, will be only the first steps towards an all European Police State.

We invite all people to become a part of CryptoCon16. Get involved, may it be by submitting a creative or critical project, clarifying or explaining a specific issue, report about something, or basically almost everything you can imagine. We would like to motivate you, to submit installations, lectures, workshops, presentations or ideas for panels and discussions as well as art installations and performances. Please submit your project until March 31, 2016 23:59 CET. A short description of your project along with the approximate time duration to cryptocon at sublab dot org or submit it directly to our conference tool1.

To get an impression of CryptoCon we recommend the recordings of our previous events[2][3]4.

1 Submit your project
2 CryptoCon15
3 CryptoCon 14
4 CryptoCon 13

Crypto Talk at 28C3: Datamining for Hackers – Encrypted Traffic Mining, Day 1, 14:00, Saal 1

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 00:23:34 +0000

The first cryptography related talk at 28C3 is about data mining in encrypted data. One may assume, that encrypting your data with a good encryption scheme prevents other people from learning about it. However, this is not true, specially for network protocols, that often leak information, like who is communicating with who, and when how much data is transferred. An attacker can use these information to make assumptions about the content of the transmission.

From the abstract: Voice over IP (VoIP) has experienced a tremendous growth over the last few years and is now widely used among the population and for business purposes. The security of such VoIP systems is often assumed, creating a false sense of privacy. Stefan will present research into leakage of information from Skype, a widely used and protected VoIP application. Experiments have shown that isolated phonemes can be classified and given sentences identified. By using the dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm, frequently used in speech processing, an accuracy of 60% can be reached. The results can be further improved by choosing specific training data and reach an accuracy of 83% under specific conditions.

I think this talk is interesting, because it can show you how much information can even be gathered from an encrypted data stream, just using some side information from the communication.

See the talk: Day 1, 14:00, Saal 1

Author: Erik Tews

crypto on CCC Event Blog

Call for Papers: CryptoCon16 – Patch Me If You Can

Crypto Talk at 28C3: Datamining for Hackers – Encrypted Traffic Mining, Day 1, 14:00, Saal 1