To verify my own understanding of the attack, this is essentially a ‘social engineering’ threat. In particular, Bob has been tricked into...
I believe we should not lose sight of the fact that the primary function of WinZip/WinRAR is file compression, with the addition of encryption as...
Justin, the attack in Kohno’s paper was based on version 9.0 of WinZip. In looking into this issue further, I found the following information,...
Have you read the article by Yeo and Phan (and also those by Kohno) discussed in this thread? The procedures to ‘break’ an encrypted, compressed...
I am confused by the verb “reconstruct” in the phrase “reconstruct plaintext.” Can you please elaborate? That appears to be sound advice!
Crack, no; but break, possibly. As Justin has explained, the “preservation of integrity” of your WinRAR encrypted file may be in question when...
That is a reasonable criticism. However, to be ‘fair & balanced,’ it should be noted that WinZip (to the best of my recollection) has never...
Some additional impressive statistics... 22 million applications are added to Ubiquity database weekly The size of the community contributing...
Yes, I agree -- I cited SecureZIP and PGP Zip because of their functional similarity to WinZip/WinRAR, in the context of the discussion about the...
Yes, I agree -- that is very much a concern (but it is not in the domain of the discussion about the ‘attacks’ identified by Kohno and by Yeo,...
I believe that the only threat against which the WinZip/WinRAR encryption was intended to protect is one in which an adversary seeks to gain...
Yes, it is true that WinZip does not support digest authentication to ensure integrity of the archive. This is a problem, I believe, for any such...
Although in general I agree with the gist of the comment, these attacks on WinZip/WinRAR appear to rely upon ‘social engineering’ or...
Thanks, Justin, for your note. Concerning the metadata issue, a simple technique to circumvent the problem is to add your plaintext file(s)...
I recall seeing an article that briefly referenced this change. If I remember the gist correctly, the article seemed to suggest that Symantec is...
Based upon my own casual reading of the academic articles “Attacking and Repairing the WinZip Encryption Scheme” by Kohno and “On the security of...
The math seems 'reasonable,' since it would require about 22 months to serve 1 trillion reputation ratings, given that 1.5 billion reputation...
Thank you, Dan, for the clarifications and insights. It is especially good to know that Norton Internet Security 2011 is leveraging the full...
Norton 360 Version 5.0 Beta is now available. Please see here for a description of the product’s features, and see here to participate in the...
It is speculation on my part, but additionally I would not be surprised to learn that the 1.5 billion files tracked by Symantec are active threats...
It is my understanding that Symantec is tracking a specific subset of all files (e.g., .EXE, .MSI, .DLL, .SYS, .DRV). It may be the case that...
Thanks, Dan, for looking into this question. To clarify, are you saying that the problem is (A) a display/formatting issue (i.e., the layout of...
Thanks for the clarification, Dantz.
In the same article, two other interesting developments are described...
However, if the system volume is encrypted with the same passphrase/key as the other volumes, then the latter are as vulnerable as the former to a...
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