Jacob Appelbaum
Jacob " Jake" Appelbaum (* 1983) is an American Internet activist and specialist in computer security. He is currently employed by the Free Software project Tor network.
Appelbaum is best known for his research on the cold start attack.
Activities
2005 at the Chaos Communication Congress 22C3 Appelbaum held two lectures. In his presentation, staff experiences bringing technology and new media to disaster areas, he reported on his trip to Iraq in April 2005 and his journey to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. His motivation for travel was his ailing father, who was murdered in December 2004. On both trips, he blogged, where he put the focus on videos and interviews. He published his photos under a Creative Commons license. His second lecture A discussion about modern disk encryption systems was an overview of different disk encryption methods in different operating systems, as well as the legal status in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. He showed that Apple's FileVault is uncertain and you can read the encrypted container with little effort.
On the 25C3 2008 he held together with David Molnar, Marc Stevens, Arjen Lenstra, Benne de Weger, Alexander Sotirov and Dag Arne Osvik a lecture entitled MD5 Considered harmful today: Creating a rogue CA certificate, in which he on a successful attack the X.509 certificate system demonstrated. By means of a collision attack on the MD5 hash function, it was possible to create a fake CA certificate (as RapidSSL marketed ) was approved by the certification body Equifax as trusted. RapidSSL had a harmless certificate signed the attacker in an automatic operation whose MD5 hash, however, was identical to a fake CA certificate. A CA certificate can new SSL / TLS certificates exhibit on any name to redirect such as supposedly secure HTTPS connections to the attacker. The expiry date of the CA certificate was intentionally set to the year 2004 so that the certificate of proof of concept also could not be used for actual attacks. In response to the attack changed RapidSSL and other X.509 certification authorities for the hash function SHA-1.
On the 29C3 in Hamburg 2012 Appelbaum gave the keynote address in which he spoke out against government surveillance and invited to participate in the Tor network.
Appelbaum is the founder of the Hacker Space "Noise Bridge" from San Francisco and worked as a photographer, as well as a representative of the artist group " monochrome ". He also became involved with Greenpeace, the Ruckus Society and the Rainforest Action Network.
2013 he informed on the 30c3 in Hamburg again on target. Together with Roger Dingledine, gave the lecture " sysadmins of the world unite " and with Julian Assange "To protect and infect, Part 2 ".
On 29 July 2010 he was in the re- entry into the U.S. set and interrogated by an employee of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, one of the Ministry's Internal Security Agency, and a member of the U.S. Army. His laptop was first seized. Since this but apparently did not contain unencrypted, searchable hard drive, he got this short time later back. The reason for setting attendance at the hacker conference "HOPE" was called. The interrogation lasted three hours, at which the U.S. officials inquired, among other things about the current whereabouts of Assange. His lawyer was not allowed to call Appelbaum at this time.
In his presentation at DEF CON 31 July 2010, he mentioned that his mobile phones were confiscated. After the lecture, he was interrogated by FBI agents.
Moving to Berlin
According to Snowden leaks to the Global surveillance and espionage Appelbaum felt the government intimidation in the U.S. as too broad and includes provisions to protect better in Germany and moved to the beginning of the first Snowden revelations to Berlin. Appelbaum has applied for a residence permit in Germany and do not want to return to the U.S. in his own words.
At the ceremony of the International Whistleblower Award by Transparency International, the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms and the Federation of German Scientists on 30 August 2013, the Berlin- Brandenburg Academy of Sciences in Berlin Appelbaum Snowden's acceptance speech was before.
Appelbaum finds himself pursued in Berlin by intelligence agencies. In December 2013 it was announced that the unknown had entered in Appelbaum's apartment in Berlin and would have made to tamper with his computer.
Appelbaum has written for the Guardian and the mirror over the practices of U.S. intelligence agencies.
Work
- Jacob Appelbaum, Julian Assange, Andy Müller- Maguhn, Jérémie Zimmermann: Cypher Punks. Freedom and the Future of the Internet. OR Books, New York 2012, ISBN 978-1-939293-00-8.