When the Snowden reports were revealed to the public, many were understandably outraged. After all it seemed like what everyone thought about security was a lie, especially since the NSA had no problems getting into emails, messages, phones, equipment, and more.
In fact there were even reports on how the NSA paid encryption companies to make their software more vulnerable so that hacking in would be easier. Then there were also reports on how the NSA is in the process of developing a quantum computer that can supposedly break any encryption.
Well it looks like a group of researchers at MIT have decided not to take that lying down and have since created an encryption system that would be able to keep out the likes of the NSA, or at least that’s what they claim.
Dubbed Mylar, this allows developers to build web applications that are invulnerable against attacks, and this is even in the face of the possibility that the attacker has access to the server on which the software is kept on. According to Raluca Popa, the MIT researcher who helped develop Mylar, “You don’t notice any difference, but your data gets encrypted using your password inside your browser before it goes to the server. If the government asks the company for your data, the server doesn’t have the ability to give unencrypted data.”
Apparently implementing Mylar is also relatively easy and straightforward and all it would require is a few extra lines of code. Now we can’t proof that Mylar will indeed be immune against attacks, even from the NSA, but it sounds promising. More details about Mylar will be presented at the NSDI conference next week. In the meantime what do you guys think of this system? Does it have potential?
Filed in . Read more about Security.