ReadWriteEnterprise

"You can't always get what you want" is literally the theme of this year's RSA Security conference in San Francisco. "With increased speed and cunning, hackers are taking advantage of the openness of today's infrastructures," said EMC's executive vice president Art Coviello, Jr. And exacerbating the problem, he said, is the fact that despite openness and open architectures, people aren't banding together for solutions.

This at a conference that officially opened Tuesday morning to a gospel choir prophesying the coming of the age of Getting What You Need. Hopefully Aretha Franklin received a cut of the royalties when one soloist, breaking from script, sang her original lyrics instead of the ones inscribed on the big-screen closed caption: "I-N-F-O-S-E-C, find out what it means to me."

It's only a few weeks now before the annual security conference that bears the initials of the first commercial implementers of cryptographic security outside the government security sector. Just in time for RSA, a team of researchers based in Switzerland say they have uncovered evidence of a new flaw in the way public keys are generated using the RSA algorithm. Those researchers include a certain, notable Dutch professor who used to make hacker headlines of his own back in the day.

Although the Swiss team's conclusions are being questioned by some respected names, their data indicates one more reason why commonly used implementations of SSL encryption may be prone to failure, and should perhaps not be trusted at all.

It may not be an independent source of data about Windows, but Microsoft's system of telemetry for tracking the causes of system failures, is orders of magnitude more sensitive than anything else in the field. A report released by Microsoft this morning reveals that what would have been a record quiet year for Windows security was pretty much wiped out by one stupid little flaw that Microsoft can't completely patch.