Flame, Stuxnet and Behaviour-based Anti-virus

Quite a few security commentators are calling the Flame malware 'the end of signature-based anti-virus'. Unfortunately it has been clear for some years that targeted attacks, and 'advanced persistent threats,' have signalled the inadequacy of signature-based prevention. The real issue here is where is behaviour-based anti-virus? There have been products around for some time in this area but I don't know how widespread take-up has been. Is it so poor that it could miss such a glaring threat as Flame? There is a critical need for innovation, and scope for new products. It is not the end of signature-based AV. Let's just hope there's a resurgence of behaviour-based protection measures to provide the defence-in-depth.

Secure Variant of the McEliece Cryptosystem

The McEliece public-key encryption scheme has become an interesting alternative to standard modern cryptosystems. Compared with other schemes it is not known to be broken by a quantum computer. It is also relatively efficent with a reasonable key size.

This work from the arxiv resource, shows the first construction of a McEliece based public-key cryptosystem secure against chosen ciphertext attacks

Researchers' scheme allows encrypted and shareable Google Docs

Yet more cloud based encryption research. Researchers at Trinity College, Dublin are reported by The Register to have developed software providing "'real-time' encryption of data before it is uploaded to the Google servers". The CipherDocs project also goes beyond simple document encryption. It preserves Google Docs ability to let users share their documents, thus allowing the secure sharing of encrypted Google docs transparently. It is also secure in the sense that Google would not have access to the encryption keys.