There's a new reason to take note of a Russian programmer who rose to modest fame with his detainment in the United States in 2001: his work to help crack encryption used in Canon cameras.
The programmer and encryption expert is Dmitry Sklyarov, and his company, Elcomsoft, has found a vulnerability in Canon's OSK-E3 system for ensuring that photos such as those used in police evidence-gathering haven't been tampered with.
The result is that the company can create doctored photos that the technology thinks are authentic. To illustrate its point, it released a few doctored photos that it says passes the Canon integrity checks.
"The vulnerability discovered by ElcomSoft questions the authenticity of all Canon signed photographic evidence and published photos and effectively proves the entire Canon Original Data Security system useless," the company said in a statement. Sklyarov presented the findings at the Confidence 2.0 conference last week.
Canon didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Sklyarov discussed his methods in a conference presentation (PDF). In it, he offered some advice on how Canon could fix the issue in future cameras. Along with the technical advice was this: "Hire people who really understand security."
(Credit: Elcomsoft)Sklyarov's earlier fame came when the FBI arrested him after presenting information about cracking encryption of an Adobe Systems eBook electronic book format. He was charged with criminal violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Adobe backed off from its support of the case after programmer protests, though, and Sklyarov was acquitted.
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