cryptography

 
Elatia Harris

Canadian-based Research In Motion will acquire Certicom, an Ontario-based security management company, for approximately C$131 million (US$105.7 million) or C$3.00 (US$2.42) per share.

Last week, BlackBerry maker RIM upped the ante on a C$2.10 per share buyout offer from VeriSign that Certicom announced on Jan. 23. However, the terms of the deal with VeriSign gave Certicom the option of paying C$4 million (US$3.2 million) should it decide to accept any "unsolicited superior proposal." VeriSign notified Certicom earlier this week that it would not top RIM's bid.

Author, security technologist, blogger, food reviewer and chief security technology officer of BT Managed Security Solutions, formerly Counterpane Internet Security, Inc. In short, you could say that Bruce Schneier is an all-rounder. But this security guru is so fond of cryptography that he has been mentioned in The Da Vinci Code book. Some have even associated Schneier with cryptography, as Linus Torvalds is to Linux.

The Internet remains vulnerable to exploits of a critical security flaw in the Domain Name System, a Russian programmer demonstrated last week. Writing on his blog on Friday, Evgeniy Polyakov posted that he had succeeded in getting patched DNS software to return an incorrect location in less than 10 hours.

His work shows that DNS patches, which had appeared to solve the immediate problem, are insufficient.

Cache Poisoning