Keeping It Real (Safe)
You probably noticed this story already:
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown faces angry questions from MPs after confidential records containing nearly half the population’s bank details went missing in the post.
The disappearance of some 25 million people’s personal data — virtually every family with children aged under 16, likely including Brown’s own — vanished in the biggest-ever loss of personal information by any government.
But never fear, Britons:
Two password-protected compact discs containing the names, addresses, dates of birth and bank account details of millions went missing after a junior official, who failed to post them recorded delivery, sent them to auditors.
That’s right–those discs are password-protected. And everybody knows that government encryption is well-nigh unbreakable. Just like government money is always well-spent and accounted for.
There’s two different meanings to “password-protected computer file”.
The first is the kind that prevents ordinary users from opening the file in MS Word (or whatever database program generated the file) unless they have a password.
The second is the kind in which the data on the disk (or in the file) won’t be in any readable format until the user provides a secret key that allows the computer to decrypt the data.
The first type can fall to hackers and reverse-engineering programmers . (Especially for widely-used formats like MS Office, or even SQL databases.)
The second type depends on the cryptographic strenght of the secret key.
However, the first kind is much easier to implement; the second kind would probably only be used by offices like the NSA (or their British equivalent).
I have a more basic question: what the frack are they doing sending that data by physical mail!? Don’t they have broadband in the UK?
At least use a special courier.