CISCO is offering up an experimental cipher which, among other things, could help preserve the anonymity of data in cloud environments. In putting what it calls "FNR" (Flexible Naor and Reingold) into the hands of the public ( http://blogs.cisco.com/security/open-sourcing-fnr-an-experimental-block-cipher/ ), CISCO says its work is currently experimental rather than production software.
The FNR specification, described here ( http://eprint.iacr.org/2014/421.pdf ) (PDF), explains that privacy of fixed-length fields (such as collected in NetFlow formats) is an emerging challenge for cloud providers, who collect lots of telemetry for analysis and don't want to change their field formats to encrypt the information.
(Score: 2) by Open4D on Tuesday June 24 2014, @01:13PM
Interesting. But if Cisco offers other people a certain licence to some software, on the condition that the licensees don't abuse relevant patents, does that condition also apply to Cisco, the licensor?
(Score: 2) by etherscythe on Tuesday June 24 2014, @07:51PM
Theoretically, perhaps. Realistically, Cisco will never sue Cisco over it, which is the enforcement mechanism. They're not quite as dumb as Sony [upenn.edu] (yet?)
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