DEFCON’S TWO-BEER version of Dan Kaminski’s PKI flaws presentation was a repeat presentation of his Black Hat talk.  Kaminsky, a flamboyant security research with IOActive, described findings from a team of researchers looking at digital certificates. Digital certificates are the identity protection mechanism inside the TLS (a/k/a SSL) protocol we all use to protect credit card data and other sensitive traffic on the Internet.
 
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DEFCON, THE ‘HACKER CON’, part of the security conference activities in Las Vegas this week, seems to not have suffered too badly from the economy. Thousands of people – computer professionals, government security folks, frat boys looking to learn to pick locks, and various other flavors of geeks have shown up at the Riviera for Defcon 17.
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