Monthly Archives: November 2005

Need Volunteers for Apache Con 2005

We’re currently looking for up to 2 people on the North American continent, close to San Diego would be an advantage to us, as we need people to man a CAcert booth for at Apache Con 2005 (10th to the 14th of December), we (CAcert Inc) can allocate some funding that can be used to cover flights/accommodation/other expenses (printing etc).

As always there is a couple of catches, firstly you must currently have 100 assurance points (ie be an assurer), you must be willing to sit on the booth for the majority of the time (10am till 4pm minimum), and preference will be given to those that already have assurances under their belts and/or manned a CAcert booth at other conferences even if it costs a little more for their flights.

Of course the benefit is that you end up getting to spend some time in warm and possibly sunny Southern California during the North American winter 🙂

Any questions or for further information please email me directly, but there needs to be a decision made on this as soon as possible to ensure people that fly in will have a place to stay etc close to the conference.

CAcert root included in Nokia 770

Nokia has included the root certificate of CAcert into the new Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. This makes it possible to use secure websites, encrypt and digitally sign emails with free certificates from CAcert.org.

Currently Knoppix, Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu, and other Linux distributions have incorporated CAcert into their products already, Nokia is the first commercial vendor to approve CAcert for it’s products. One of the main goals of CAcert was to be included in major browsers and CAcert continues to actively pursue other vendors such as Opera, Mozilla and Microsoft to be included as part of their browsers.

CAcert is a community certification authority that issues free SSL certificates worldwide for individuals and organisations, and CAcert aims to enable better privacy for the Internet. CAcert is committed to high standards of security and verification, to achieve this goal CAcert operates a worldwide network of Assurers who are verifying the identities according to the 4 eyes principle (or better), to have a high level of verification as it is of little benefit having security if you aren’t sure who you really are communicating with at the other end.

Lisa 2005

At the LISA’05 Usenix/SAGE conference, running from the 4th of December up to the 9th of December 2005 in San Diego USA, you will find PGP signing and CAcert Assurance opportunities at the PGP and CAcert meeting point in the conference hall.

HCC dagen UNIX-gg

At the HCC dagen (three days show for computer and software hobbyists), running from 25-27th of November 2005 in Utrecht, Holland you will be able to obtain PGP signatures and CAcert certificate Assurances at the UNIX-gg stand at the show.

NLUUG Automn Conference

NLUUG Autumn Conference, 17th of November 2005, Ede, Holland.
The conference will host PGP signing, and CAcert certificate Assurances opportunity. There is a special meeting point arranged for these Assurances. The NLUUG (dutch UNIX Users Group) is an Open Source association, meeting twice a year in Ede, Holland.

Time for the paranoid to start upgrading keys

MathWorld News is reporting that RSA-640 has been factored. F. Bahr, M. Boehm, J. Franke, and T. Kleinjung, memebers of the German Federal Agency for Information Technology Security (BSI) announced they had cracked the 193-digit number last Friday using the General Number Field Sieve. The team purportedly used 80 opteron CPUs and 5 months to achieve victory.”

I realise that 1024bit keys are exponentially bigger then 640bit, however this shows that the time to crack 1024bit keys are getting awfully close to useless when dealing with material that needs a longish life span, not to mention some of the root certificates in browsers are still 1024bit, and even if it took these guys 5 times as long, those certificates are still going to be valid when they get finished.

And people complained about the 4096bit certificate CAcert uses 🙂 (well complained because not all apps supported key sizes bigger then 1024bit!)

PS found this website, which gives a break down of how long you can expect varying keylengths to be good for.