UPDATED 15:49 EDT / DECEMBER 28 2013

Weekly security review: RSA lashes out over bribe allegations, mobile security takes spotlight

RSA, EMC’s security division, was recently dragged into the NSA scandal by a Reuters reporter accusing it of accepting a $10 million bribe from the spy agency to insert a vulnerability into the Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator, or Dual EC DRBG, a widely used cipher implemented by companies worldwide.

If the story is to be believed, the encryption stalwart – which in the 1990s opposed a plan to equip computers with chips that would allow the US government to spy on users – purposely packaged an NSA-developed backdoor into the cipher, which is distributed with its BSafe software. RSA categorically denies the charges.

“We made the decision to use Dual EC DRBG as the default in BSAFE toolkits in 2004, in the context of an industry-wide effort to develop newer, stronger methods of encryption. At that time, the NSA had a trusted role in the community-wide effort to strengthen, not weaken, encryption,” the company said.

Samsung has been doing some denying of its own over in the mobile space after researchers discovered a major flaw in its Knox security software, which comes preinstalled with a number of Android devices.

The technology separates personal and professional data to let users bring their own devices to work without compromising their privacy or introducing additional risk to the corporate network. The container which holds company data encrypts information both both at-rest and in motion, but it turns out these measures can be easily bypassed by a malicious application installed in the regular, non-secure area of the phone. Despite calls to issue a fix for the vulnerability, Samsung insists that “the core Knox architecture cannot be compromised or infiltrated by such malware.”


A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU