Wednesday, July 21, 2010

TrueCrypt Version 7.0 Released With Hardware Accelerator Support

TrueCrypt is a software application that provides great on-the-fly encryption capabilities. It is an open source tool that is available free of cost for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux platforms.

It creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk. It can also encrypt an entire partition or storage device such as USB flash drive or hard drive. It encrypts a partition or drive where Windows is installed (pre-boot authentication). It also allows parallelisation and pipelining that allows data to be read and written as fast as if the drive was not encrypted. Most importantly, it provides the plausible deniability feature, in case an adversary forces you to reveal the password.

However, TrueCrypt is not a panacea and users are required to take additional security mechanisms to keep their date completely safe.

TrueCrypt has recently released version 7.0. Some new features have been added the chief among them are hardware-accelerated AES, support for devices that use sector sizes other than 512 bytes, ability to configure a volume to be automatically mounted whenever its host device gets connected to the computer, favorites organizer, and more.

Most of Intel's Core i5 and i7 processors support AES-NI instructions required to accelerate the AES engine. However those who don't trust Intel's implementation of AES can force Truecrypt to use its own open source AES engine, without hardware acceleration.

If you find the product useful, consider donating some amount so that the product can be further improved and continued to be available free of cost.

India Is Getting Ready For IPV6 Framework

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is an Internet Protocol version which is designed to succeed IPv4. Till now IPv4 is still in use and world over efforts are under process to shift to IPv6.

The main reason for this shift to IPv6 is inadequacy of IPv4 to accommodate the growing demands of IP addresses. Besides, network security is also integrated into the design of the IPv6 architecture.

The Indian government has recently released the roadmap for IPv6 deployment in the country in a time bound manner. Indian citizens would be able to start using IPv6 services by March 2012.

All the Telecom and Internet Service providers are required to become IPv6 compliant by December-2011 and offer IPv6 services thereafter.

However, cyber security issues of IPv6 cannot be ignored. Many security solutions don’t support IPv6 very well today. Many IPS vendors are “light” with their IPv6 signatures and v6-based anomaly detection is also light. Support for IPv6 amongst SIEM vendors varies widely. And then, there’s network management – how well does your console support IPv6?

We must also not forget that a complete tool set to attack the inherent protocol weaknesses of IPv6 and ICMP6 with an easy to use packet factory library is openly available.

Any shift from IPv4 to IPv6 must keep in mind all the aspects.

Cyber Investigative Services In India

Cyberspace dealings are increasing day by day as information and communication technology (ICT) has become an essential part of our daily lives. Whether it is e-governance or e-commerce, technology has touched almost all aspects of our lives.

However, cyberspace, like real word, is not a safe place. In fact, it is less safe than real space because we cannot ascertain with whom we are dealings unless we use technical methods to ascertain the identity of a cyber netizens.

Digital forensics investigation is one of the methods where the perpetrators of cyber crimes and cyber contraventions can be ascertained. Digital forensics investigations in India are still at the infancy stage and very few specialised firms are providing these services.

Cyber investigation services are essentially techno legal in nature. This is so because we need both technical as well as legal issues to be addressed while conducting a cyber investigation. Further, cyber investigation also required techno legal training so that cyber investigators can handle the cases properly.

A wrongly handled case may be lost in a court of law. The chain of evidence must be kept intact otherwise the evidence may be inadmissible in courts. This also requires proper handling of digital evidence by the digital investigators.

Legal Services India: A Legal Platform or Illegal Platform

Bar council of India (BCI) has been trying a lot to improve the standards of Indian legal profession but the one thing that it has to take care of is the lack of research capabilities and legal acumen. A closer scrutiny of most of the articles written by law students of even by national law schools show the poor state of legal research capabilities in India.

Even worst is the platforms that publish the same. They even do not bother to make a preliminary search to ascertain whether the article in questions is original or not? One such platform that is very regular in copyright violations of other is Legal Services India. It frequently publishes copyright violated articles at its platform. At times they are almost complete cut, copy and paste one whereas on numerous occasions its authors pick large number of contents without prior permission and proper attribution.

For example, consider the article titled Copyright law in India published at Indymedia by Mr. Praveen Dalal. The same was published on 14/07/2005 at 15:23. Now consider this article under the same title published on 20 Mar 2008. It is a clear case of copyright violation as the dates suggests themselves.

There are many such articles published at the Legal Services India that is openly and blatantly violating the copyright of others. Now even the administrator of legal services is aware of this copyright violation, it would be a fit case to prosecute them under the provisions of Indian Copyright Act, 1957.

It appears that the legal research acumen of Indian legal fraternity is at its lowest rung. The efforts of BCI to streamline the same are praiseworthy but the task is not easy to manage as long as we have students and platforms like legal services that openly violate others copyright.