Four short links: 29 November 2018
Security Sci-Fi, AWS Toys, Quantum Ledger, and Insecurity in Software in Hardware
- The Cliff Nest — sci-fi story with computer security challenges built in.
- Amazon Textract — OCR in the cloud, extracting not just text but also structured tables. Part of a big feature dump Amazon’s done today, including recommendations, AWS on-prem, and a fully managed time series database.
- Quantum Ledger Database — a fully managed ledger database that provides a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log owned by a central trusted authority. Amazon QLDB tracks each and every application data change and maintains a complete and verifiable history of changes over time. Many of the advantages of a blockchain ledger without the distributed pains. Quantum in the sense of “minimum chunk of something,” not “uses quantum computing.”
- Sennheiser Headset Software Enabled MITM Attacks — When users have been installing Sennheiser’s HeadSetup software, little did they know the software was also installing a root certificate into the Trusted Root CA Certificate store. To make matters worse, the software was also installing an encrypted version of the certificate’s private key that was not as secure as the developers may have thought. This is the price of using software to improve hardware.
