This is from the H-Online Article:
NIST-certified USB Flash drives with hardware encryption cracked
Yes; DCI specifies that the euqipment meets FIPs Level 3, not level 2. But 3 huge companies making the same mistake? Hmmm. Plus, this is not just a DCinema issue, this affect everyone who tries to keep their personal or work computer safe, trusting devices and technology of this type. My guess is that there was an Application Note that specified how to make a particular chipset work (which all the manufacturers used.) It was the Application Note that everyone followed and which had the implementation flaw. Just a guess.

The article continues, excepted below. There is also some fine commentary about this issue at: Schnieier on Security.

The USB drives in question encrypt the stored data via the practically uncrackable AES 256-bit hardware encryption system. … the SySS security experts found a rather blatant flaw that has quite obviously slipped through testers’ nets. … the program will, irrespective of the password, always send the same character string to the drive after performing various crypto operations…

Cracking the drives is therefore quite simple. The SySS experts wrote a small tool … The vulnerable devices include the Kingston DataTraveler BlackBox, the SanDisk Cruzer Enterprise FIPS Edition and the Verbatim Corporate Secure FIPS Edition.

When notified by SySS about this worst case security scenario, the respective vendors responded quite differently. Kingston started a recall of the affected products; SanDisk and Verbatim issued woolly security bulletins about a “potential vulnerability in the access control application” and provided a software update.

Security and Privacy are parallel tracks. Letting someone into your computer for purposes that you are not allowed to control, or even know about, is fraught with potential points of failure down the line. Do I, or you, need to know how or why right now? Is there always someone who is trying to exploit was to find hidden files to do something nefarious? Just allowing someone, anyone, to put 100k (the standard setting, not a limit) of info on your computer without asking, without allowing you to see what it actually does or says, is wrong.

CCleaner, FlashCookiesView and Flash Cookie Cleaner get good reviews. If you are using Firefox, you can use Foxit and flashblock, but remember, these files are ubiquitous – they are shared by all browsers on your system.

Here is the link for the settings manager at Adobe — feels like fox in the henhouse, and is not easy to use…

[Update: I just used a nice program from MacHacks named Flush.app – Flash Cookie Removal Tool For OS X. Quick to download and simple to use, for Mac users it seems a nice way to go.]

Read ArsTechnica; 768-bit RSA cracked, 1024-bit safe (for now)—768-bit RSA cracked, 1024-bit safe (for now)

Researchers have posted a preprint that describes their method for factoring a number used for RSA 768-bit encryption. By John Timmer | Last updated January 7, 2010 5:20 PM

With the increasing computing power available to even casual users, the security-conscious have had to move on to increasingly robust encryption, lest they find their information vulnerable to brute-force attacks. The latest milestone to fall is 768-bit RSA; in a paper posted on a cryptography preprint server, academic researchers have now announced that they factored one of these keys in early December.

Most modern cryptography relies on single large numbers that are the product of two primes. If you know the numbers, it’s relatively easy to encrypt and decrypt data; if you don’t, finding the numbers by brute force is a big computational challenge. But this challenge gets easier every year as processor speed and efficiency increase, making “secure” a bit of a moving target. The paper describes how the process was done with commodity hardware, albeit lots of it. 

Their first step involved sieving, or identifying appropriate integers; that took the equivalent of 1,500 years on one core of a 2.2GHz Opteron; the results occupied about 5TB. Those were then uniqued and processed into a matrix; because of all the previous work, actually using the matrix to factor the RSA value only took a cluster less than half a day. Although most people aren’t going to have access to these sorts of clusters, they represent a trivial amount of computing power for many organizations. As a result, the authors conclude, “The overall effort is sufficiently low that even for short-term protection of data of little value, 768-bit RSA moduli can no longer be recommended.” 1024-bit values should be good for a few years still.

Given that these developments are somewhat inevitable, even the authors sound a bit bored by their report. “There is nothing new to be reported for the square root step, except for the resulting factorization of RSA-768” they write. “Nevertheless, and for the record, we present some of the details.” Still, they manage to have a little fun, in one place referencing a YouTube clip of a Tarantino film following their use of the term “bingo.”

[Another good article at: New Record in the Area of Prime Number Decomposition of Cryptographically Important Numbers – not that the article gives more, but the Related Stories are interesting.]