In January of last year, cybersecurity researcher Travis Goodspeed gave a presentation at the S4 conference in Miami where he described a way to bypass encryption on Zigbee wireless chips, which some smart electric metering systems would use to communicate.

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Apple learned this the hard way when their hardware encryption was broken in iOS 4.

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The team froze phones for an hour as a way to get around the encryption system that protects the data on a phone by scrambling it.

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Installing security and encryption solutions (are another) way to do it.

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Well, that really does not make much of a difference when you expose the entire database table and have way too much faith in the 34 year old encryption algorithm reported to be used to safeguard the data.

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And since Silent Circle doesn't host the required encryption key on its servers, there's no way for the company to access users' data.

ENGADGET

It sought to encrypt data traffic between the laptop and the access point, but did so in a way that was later found to be so inadequate that someone with relatively little technical knowledge could break the encryption scheme and eavesdrop on traffic.

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Nothing much happened, however, until 1946 when an American mathematician called Warren Weaver became intrigued with the way the British had used their pioneering Colossus computer to crack the military codes produced by Germany's Enigma encryption machines.

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