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Do You Think End-to-End Encryption Should Be Banned?

End-to-end encryption continues to be a hot topic politically and with law enforcement. The law wants the option to search smartphones for evidence in an investigation. But the makers of popular smartphones bake protections into operating systems so that our data is kept safe, even from law enforcement. But not everyone thinks they should be able to be protected and believe a backdoor should be included on the devices for the purposes of law enforcement. The United States is considering banning end-to-end encryption for this reason. Do you think end-to-end encryption should be banned? Our Opinion … Read more

How to Change Your LUKS Encryption Passphrase

You decided to protect your data with LUKS, and that’s great, but you chose a bad passphrase, and you need to change it. You’re in luck. Unlike a lot of encryption solutions, LUKS actually does allow you to change your passphrase fairly easily. Unfortunately, this isn’t a solution for a lost passphrase, you do need to know your previous one, but it is a great way to rotate passphrases or get rid of a poorly designed old one. Changing the Passphrase Simply changing your passphrase on a LUKS drive with only one passphrase is extremely easy. Open a terminal and run the following command, substituting… Read more

How Secure Is Your Stolen Encrypted Data?

Chances are that some of your data has been stolen. Ever use Yahoo? 3 billion Yahoo accounts were nabbed in 2013. Visit a Marriott hotel? 500 million Marriott accounts were stolen over four years, 2014 – 2018. Did you manage to somehow hang on to your old Hotmail address and edgy teenage spirit? 360 million MySpace accounts, hacked. Use MyFitnessPal? 150 million accounts. So what exactly did the hackers get? Every hack is different, but they almost definitely got your email address, user information, records of your activity on the site, and possibly much more damaging things. Good news, though: a lot of the most… Read more

Hashing vs. Encryption: How Your Password Is Being Stored in Server

Let’s say you set up an account at VerySecureWebsite.com. You type in your email address and password and set up your account. A little while later you receive an email informing you that, ironically, the website has been hacked, and the usernames and passwords of every user, which were stored in plaintext, are now for sale on the dark web. While you start changing the password on all your accounts (you only use one, you monster), you wonder, “Isn’t that a bad idea? Shouldn’t my password be in some kind of secret code so hackers can’t just read it?” You’re correct. Any web app or… Read more

How to Encrypt Files with Gocryptfs

Encryption is almost a necessity now that security and privacy standards are not strictly adhered to by companies anymore. If you are really concerned about the security of your data that you stored in the cloud, and you really need to store it in the cloud, it is best to encrypt it first before you upload it to the cloud. Gocryptfs is an encrypted overlay filesystem written in Go and is built on top of the go-fuse FUSE library. Unlike full-disk encryption systems, gocryptfs encrypts files individually using chunked AES-GCM (Galois Counter Mode) and encrypts filenames with AES-EME (ECB-Mix-ECB). It is also cross-platform compatible, which… Read more