Dominic Letz

OMG! So it happens again. PKI the Public Key Infrastructure is a centrally rooted security infrastructure to encrypt nearly all of todays internet traffic. And is being used to crack all traffic in Kazakhstan.

Yesterday on the 18h of July 2019, the state-owned telecommunications organization of Kazakhstan started to misuse this central infrastructure in the states initiative against free speech. The now dictatorship of Kazakhstan is forcing its users to install a custom Kazakhstan root...

You just decided to start your next project using blockchain. That is awesome congrats! But now you face the many choices: Which blockchain platform and clients are technically suited for your use case?

Makers and IoT specialists know that when designing embedded systems it’s important to understand the technical parameters within which each component can work. The same is true when selecting the blockchain technology. Required storage capacity on the device, RAM usage, and bandwidth...

- Click here if you just want to read the Paper -

In the last two posts of this series, we first introduced the governance issues in PKI and then the circular dependency between establishing trust in PKI certificates and establishing the current time on a connected device.

So let’s break that circular dependency between time and trust. The difference between trusting a person/an entity and trusting data is key here. How...

Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network virtualization have been the disruptor technologies that were fundamental to the success of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers such as Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Compute, and Azure during the last decade. Before that, there were plenty of rival cloud providers - for most of them, changing network configurations, adding/removing machines to a network required human interaction and would take hours or sometimes days. Dedicated networking, networking...

“If you knew Time as well as I do,” said the Hatter, “ you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him.”
“ I don’t know what you mean,” said Alice.
“ Of course you don’t !” the Hatter said, tossing his head contemptuously. “ I dare say you never even spoke to Time ! Alice in Wonderland

In order to trust a time source, we need to validate its...

You may not be aware of this but if you are browsing the web or running IoT devices in your business or at your home, you are being protected by a 30-year-old security infrastructure. In this post, we will uncover the history of the internet PKI that holds most of the internet together today and highlight some of the most obvious threats and known flaws. This article is the first in a series investigating the...

In Today’s internet, the authenticity of content is secured by the internet PKI system and the domain name registries. To make it all work first the domain name server (DNS), second you - holding the certificate and the corresponding private key and third a certificate authority which signed your certificate all have to agree on the same data to create this security.

A single miss like a domain name server pointing to a different server...