← SANS Internet Stormcenter Daily Cyber Security Podcast (Stormcast)
SANS Internet Stormcenter Daily Cyber Security Podcast (Stormcast)
SANS Stormcast Monday Feb 24th: sigs.py update; Google Introdusing Quantum Safe Sigs; MSFT Update Win 11 issues; LTE/5G Vulns;
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SANS Stormcast Monday Feb 24th: sigs.py update; Google Introdusing Quantum Safe Sigs; MSFT Update Win 11 issues; LTE/5G Vulns;
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Hello and welcome to the Monday, February 24, 2025 edition of the Sands & the Stormcenters Stormcast. My name is Johannes Ulrich and today I'm recording from Jacksonville, Florida in diaries. This weekend we got a new tool or an improved tool better from Jim. Jim looked into verifying hashes and improved his tool 6Py. The big difference of this tool compared to some of the other tools is you don't have to tell it what hashing algorithm to use. So if you have a text file with file names and hashes of various formats, the tool will go through the text file, figure out what hash format was used for a particular hash based on its length, and then verify whether or not the file with that name matches that hash. That sort of solves some of the issues when you're dealing with, for example, trying to verify binaries. Every distributor of binary sort of has their own little way how they're calculating the hashes. This makes it just a little bit more straightforward. And then a little follow up to the Microsoft quantum computing story from last week. Google now rolled out post quantum cryptography for its cloud key management system, or kms. This is the kind of stuff that we really need to implement some of these algorithms. Vendors like Google supporting them in their product products to essentially then make it just the flip of a switch in order to switch to this new algorithm. Haven't played with it yet, but if anybody has, let me know what your experience is if there are any issues that you ran into here. This wasn't necessarily prompted by Microsoft's announcement. I believe that Google has been working on this for a while. Just happened sort of that, you know, late last week they made an announcement after Microsoft made their announcement about their breakthrough in quantum computing. Just want to also clarify a little bit the vocabulary here. So quantum computing, that's when we're talking about computers that use quantum effects in order to improve things like break ciphers, then we do have post quantum cryptography. Post quantum cryptography means these are ciphers that are also sometimes called quantum safe. So themselves they don't need quantum computers in order to apply the cipher. They need normal regular computers. But they basically are countering the threat posed by quantum computers. Then there's also something called quantum cryptography. Completely different, actually sometimes more correctly called quantum key exchange, but use quantum effects to actually transmit data and protect it from eavesdropping. Totally different from the other two. I've sometimes been misquoted myself too where it sort of says, hey, quantum encryption will protect against the threat posed by quantum computing. It's really post quantum cryptography or quantum safe algorithms will protect against the threat posed by quantum computing and apparently a number of users are having issues with the latest Microsoft Updates and Windows 11. I will post a link to a website called Windows Latest that summarizes some of these issues that users are having. The good news so far appears to be if you uninstall the patch and reboot the system, things should go back to normal. One apparently particularly annoying issue is with the file manager where it breaks after you apply the patch. If you have any issues here, let me know if you found any other workarounds or any specific problems, particularly around Windows 11. This appears to be happening the most and we got a paper from research at University of Florida that outlines a good number of different new vulnerabilities in protocols and software related to 5G and LTE networks. What this really means to you is for the most part, well, don't trust a network that you don't manage. So if you connect to another system over 5G, LTE cable modem, doesn't matter, don't trust the network. Set up some form of end to end encryption. VPNs of course are your friend here for the most part. Now if you happen to work for a telco, well then don't trust the network you're managing. Think about the out of band access and how you would detect some of these threats. Will probably take a while due to a large number of vulnerabilities here for them to be mitigated in some form. So overall, like I said, trust encryption end to end. Don't trust the network. Well, and that's it for today. So thanks for listening and talk to you again tomorrow. Bye.