US Declassifies Information on JUMPSEAT Spy Satellites - Schneier on Security

The US National Reconnaissance Office has declassified information about a fleet of spy satellites operating between 1971 and 2006. I’m actually impressed to see a declassification only two decades after decommission.

1980s Hacker Manifesto - Schneier on Security

Forty years ago, The Mentor—Loyd Blankenship—published “The Conscience of a Hacker” in Phrack. You bet your ass we’re all alike… we’ve been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak… the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We’ve been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert. This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals...

SIGINT During World War II - Schneier on Security

The NSA and GCHQ have jointly published a history of World War II SIGINT: “Secret Messengers: Disseminating SIGINT in the Second World War.” This is the story of the British SLUs (Special Liaison Units) and the American SSOs (Special Security Officers).

The First Password on the Internet - Schneier on Security

It was created in 1973 by Peter Kirstein: So from the beginning I put password protection on my gateway. This had been done in such a way that even if UK users telephoned directly into the communications computer provided by Darpa in UCL, they would require a password. In fact this was the first password on Arpanet. It proved invaluable in satisfying authorities on both sides of the Atlantic for the 15 years I ran the service ­ during which no security breach occurred over my link. I also put in place a system of governance that any UK users had to be approved by a committee which I chaired but which also had UK government and British Post Office representation...

Steve Bellovin's Retirement Talk - Schneier on Security

Steve Bellovin is retiring. Here’s his retirement talk, reflecting on his career and what the cybersecurity field needs next.

Good Essay on the History of Bad Password Policies - Schneier on Security

Stuart Schechter makes some good points on the history of bad password policies: Morris and Thompson’s work brought much-needed data to highlight a problem that lots of people suspected was bad, but that had not been studied scientifically. Their work was a big step forward, if not for two mistakes that would impede future progress in improving passwords for decades. First, was Morris and Thompson’s confidence that their solution, a password policy, would fix the underlying problem of weak passwords. They incorrectly assumed that if they prevented the specific categories of weakness that they had noted, that the result would be something strong. After implementing a requirement that password have multiple characters sets or more total characters, they wrote:...

List of Old NSA Training Videos - Schneier on Security

Adm. Grace Hopper's 1982 NSA Lecture Has Been Published - Schneier on Security

The “long lost lecture” by Adm. Grace Hopper has been published by the NSA. (Note that there are two parts.) It’s a wonderful talk: funny, engaging, wise, prescient. Remember that talk was given in 1982, less than a year before the ARPANET switched to TCP/IP and the internet went operational. She was a remarkable person. Listening to it, and thinking about the audience of NSA engineers, I wonder how much of what she’s talking about as the future of computing—miniaturization, parallelization—was being done in the present and in secret. ...

Brett Solomon on Digital Rights - Schneier on Security