Hello and welcome to the Monday, February 24th, 2025
edition of the SANS and Storm Center's Stormcast. My name is
Johannes Ulrich and today I'm recording from Jacksonville,
Florida. In diaries this weekend we got a new tool or
an improved tool better from Jim. Jim looked into verifying
hashes and improved his tool 6 .py. The big difference of
this tool compared to some of the other tools is you don't
have to tell it what hashing algorithm to use. So if you
have a text file with file names and hashes of various
formats, the tool will go through the text file, figure
out what hash format was used for a particular hash based on
its length, and then verify whether or not the file with
that name matches that hash. That sort of solves some of
the issues when you're dealing with, for example, trying to
verify binaries. Every distributor of binaries sort
of has their own little way how they're calculating the
hashes. This makes it just a little bit more
straightforward. And then a little follow-up to the
Microsoft quantum computing story from last week. Google
now rolled out post-quantum cryptography for its cloud key
management system or KMS. This is the kind of stuff that we
really need to implement some of these algorithms. Vendors
like Google supporting them in their products to essentially
then make it just the flip of a switch in order to switch to
this new algorithm. Haven't played with it yet, but if
anybody has, let me know what your experience is, if there
are any issues that you ran into here. This wasn't
necessarily prompted by Microsoft's announcement. I
believe that Google has been working on this for a while.
Just happened sort of that late last week. They made that
announcement after Microsoft made their announcement about
their breakthrough in quantum computing. Just want to also
clarify a little bit the vocabulary here. So quantum
computing, that's when we're talking about computers that
use quantum effects in order to improve things like break
ciphers. Then we do have post -quantum cryptography. Post
-quantum cryptography means these are ciphers that are
also something called quantum safe. So themselves, they
don't need quantum computers in order to apply the cipher.
They need normal or regular computers, but they basically
are countering the threat posed by quantum computers.
Then there's also something called quantum cryptography.
Completely different, actually sometimes more correctly
called quantum key exchange. They use quantum effects to
actually transmit data and protect it from eavesdropping.
Totally different from the other two. I've sometimes been
misquoted myself too, where it says, hey, quantum encryption
will protect against the threat posed by quantum
computing. It's really post -quantum cryptography or
quantum safe algorithms will protect against the threat
posed by quantum computing. And apparently a number of
users are having issues with the latest Microsoft updates
and Windows 11. I will post a link to a website called
Windows Latest that summarizes some of these issues that
users are having. The good news so far appears to be if
you uninstall the patch and reboot the system, things
should go back to normal. One apparently particularly
annoying issue is with the file manager where it breaks
after you apply the patch. If you have any issues here, let
me know if you found any other workarounds or any specific
problems, particularly around Windows 11. This appears to be
happening the most. And we got a paper from research at
University of Florida that outlines a good number of
different and new vulnerabilities in protocols
and software related to 5G and LTE networks. What this really
means to you is, for the most part, well, don't trust a
network that you don't manage. So if you connect to another
system over 5G, LTE, cable modem, it doesn't matter.
Don't trust the network. Set up some form of end-to-end
encryption. VPNs, of course, are your friend here for the
most part. Now, if you happen to work for a telco, well,
then don't trust the network you're managing. Think about
out-of-band access and how you would detect some of these
threats. It will probably take a while due to a large number
of vulnerabilities here for them to be mitigated in some
form. So overall, like I said, trust encryption end-to-end.
Don't trust the network. Well, and that's it for today. So
thanks for listening and talk to you again tomorrow. Bye.
Bye. Bye. Bye. Thank you.
