New Products Fill Gap in Encryption Protection
A company has developed a new encryption technology that provides protection not found in current encryption systems. BlueGem Security's LocalSSL prevents hackers from using keylogger tools to intercept and view user keystrokes.
BlueGem Security developed LocalSSL encryption technology which prevents hackers from using keylogger tools to intercept and view user keystrokes used to enter passwords, Social Security and credit card numbers, and other personal information. LocalSSL protects transmissions with 128-key encryption. The product bypasses the operating system, where keyloggers reside, and sends encrypted keyboard transmissions directly to a Web browser or other application. Current commercial encryption systems generally protect only the communications from sender to recipient and don't address transmissions in the segment between a user's keyboard and a local application.
This segment is where freestanding keyloggers or those installed with Trojan horses can intercept keystrokes being used to enter passwords, Social Security and credit card numbers, financial data, and other personal information and then send the material back to the attacker, explained Joe Park, BlueGem's president and chief technical officer.
LocalSSL, currently deployed in South Korea, uses 128-bit encryption on the transmissions resulting from keystrokes. The technology is BlueGem's locally implemented version of the Secure Sockets Layer encryption scheme for Internet communications.
In addition to encryption, Park said, LocalSSL bypasses the operating system, where keyloggers reside, and sends encrypted keyboard transmissions directly to a Web browser or other application. "Typically," he explained, "keyloggers are at the messaging queue or driver level, as well as at other layers within the operating system, to capture user key-related events."
BlueGem has three products, each named for the type of applications it protects: LocalSSL Internet, LocalSSL Email, and LocalSSL Microsoft Office. The products work with any server hardware or software. Each has a footprint of only about 600 Kbytes.
According to Park, customers use LocalSSL to secure activities such as their online banking and securities-trading account sign-ins, virtual-private-network access, credit card and mortgage loan applications, and electronic tax filing.
BlueGem's products offer an important type of additional business and personal security, said analyst Rick Saia with the Aberdeen Group, a market research firm.
This could be particularly useful in regulation-intensive industries such as financial services and healthcare, he noted.
News Briefs written by
Linda Dailey Paulson, a freelance technology writer based in Ventura, California. Contact her at ldpaulson@yahoo.com.
US Agency Plans New Internet
The US National Science Foundation (NSF) is beginning an effort to reengineer the Internet to overcome its shortcomings and accommodate future technologies and emerging applications.
Many researchers say the Internet needs a new architecture, built largely from scratch, to address problems not envisioned in the original small, trust-oriented Internet, such as huge global traffic volumes and security threats.
The NSF hopes its Global Environment for Networking Investigations (GENI) project will create this new Internet, designed to work in a world dominated by wireless communications, widespread sensors, new services, and mission-critical networked activities such as those undertaken by banks and electrical utilities.
Big companies and organizations would rather use a general-purpose, readily available network like the Internet than a special-purpose network, said Guru Parulkar, director of the NSF's Networking Technology and Systems Program. "However," he explained, "security and robustness concerns make the Internet a risky proposition."
To work on such problems, GENI will include both a grant-funded research program and a test facility. If fully funded, the initiative will cost an estimated $300 million.
According to Parulkar, the NSF's Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering has already funded eight small research projects and is seeking more participants, including US government agencies and perhaps organizations in other countries.
Security and privacy, not faster transmission speeds, will be particular priorities for GENI, noted David Clark, a senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The research will explore hardware—including wireless devices, sensor nodes, and customizable core routers—and platforms—such as infrastructures designed to facilitate large-scale distributed applications and systems.
Parulkar said scientists could use GENI's testbed, along with real and artificial network traffic, to measure important network-related metrics such as throughput, delay, and packet loss.
The testing capabilities are critical, explained UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock, whose research helped create today's Internet. For GENI, he explained, "We have to measure how it is performing and run controlled tests that stress the network to its limits so that we can determine the outer envelope of its capabilities and discover faults, degradations, and deadlocks in the design, and then fix them."
The NSF will work on GENI with typical Internet users, as well as network researchers, to also meet their needs, Parulkar said. Multiple participants will be able to use parts of available server and network time simultaneously.
To benefit from other experimental networks, Parulkar said, GENI might link with Internet2 (www.internet2.edu) and will connect to PlanetLab (www.planet-lab.org).
Clark explained that work on GENI will have two significant parts: conceptualizing the network and establishing objectives, and then building up an infrastructure that can test the resulting research.
"Perhaps GENI's most important aspect is that it will allow fresh, new, bold ideas and architectures to bubble up and be examined for their potential," Kleinrock said.
Company Makes First Multipurpose, Programmable Mobile Chip
A chip vendor has developed the first programmable mobile chip that handles most communications-, media-, and application-related processing by itself and is compatible with multiple wireless technologies.
Sandbridge Technologies' SB 3010 reduces the need for cell phones and other mobile devices to have multiple chips and thus makes them more flexible, less expensive, and more competitive in the marketplace.
The SB 3010 chip contains an ARM mobile processor connected by a bus bridge to four multithreaded, 600-MHz digital signal processors, explained Sandbridge president and CEO Guenter Weinberger. The ARM component is responsible for application and communications processing, while the DSPs handle signal processing.
The SB 3010's various capabilities are programmed in separate software modules. The modules let a single chip work with any third-generation (3G) cellular technology, Wi-Fi (IEEE 802. 11), or the Global Positioning System (GPS); and also handle baseband, application, and multimedia processing.
Until now, using many modules on a chip has increased costs and power consumption to unacceptable levels. However, Sandbridge says its architecture has cut costs, and its use of multithreading and deep pipelines has reduced the SB 3010's memory-bandwidth requirements and thus power consumption.
Because various global regions work with different communications technologies, the SB 3010 would enable design of a phone that could be used worldwide.
In addition, one chip could permit a single device to be used for multiple purposes, or the chip could be incorporated in numerous types of devices, such as a cellular or Wi-Fi phone, a GPS location-tracking device, or a receiver for a digital TV or radio.
In addition, Sandbridge has designed its processor so that it can be programmed in C. Most mobile chips must be programmed in assembly language, whose code is more compact and uses less of a mobile device's limited memory, explained analyst Will Strauss with Forward Concepts, a market research firm. This is an advantage because there are more C programmers, and they are less expensive to hire, he explained.
The first SB 3010s are available now for use by device makers, according to Weinberger.
Next year, Weinberger said, Sandbridge plans to upgrade the chip for higher-speed 3.5G and WiMax (IEEE 802.16) networks.
The SB 3010 has a novel architecture, according to Strauss. Moreover, he said, Sandbridge will have a one- or two-year head start on the major mobile chip makers—such as Intel, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments—that are also developing multipurpose processors.
However, he said, most device makers probably won't want to sever longstanding relationships with such chip makers to try an unproven approach.
Device makers are also unsure about using the SB 3010 because Sandbridge hasn't announced its price yet, Weinberger noted.
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