security: June 2003 Archives

The most common use of passwords is to authenticate a user to a system, but there are other uses for passwords. This document by Matthew S. Hamrick, provides some guidance to software developers as to how to properly implement systems that use or hold passwords.

The Department of Computer Science at Rice University has found a new class of low-bandwidth denial of service attacks that exploit algorithmic deficiencies in many common applications' data structures... Using bandwidth less than a typical dialup modem, they can bring a dedicated Bro server to its knees. They show how modern universal hashing techniques can yield performance comparable to commonplace hash functions while being provably secure against these attacks.