A while ago I visited Washington DC to visit a potential partner, DS3 Datavaulting. At that time the country was still in the hands of the Bush administration. Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama were enrolled in a tough Democratic candidate election. The outcome was yet unclear.

Next week I will visit DS3 Datavaulting again, this time as partner. Since I will stay over for the weekend I have time to feel some of the vibes in the aftermath of the historic ‘change’ that came over the US by the inauguration of Barack Obama as the new president.

After my visit to DS3 Datavaulting I will go to Las Vegas, Nevada. We will be attending the Parallels Summit on 2 until 4 February. Based on the masses that joined to see the inauguration I expect to meet a lot of people with a very good mood and renewed energy to do business.

Recently there has been some commotion regarding vulnerabilities in SSL. Apparently SSL certificates that are encrypted using MD5 can be counterfeited by hackers. MD5 was known to be vulnerable to this for almost 2 years, but it had to take a couple of Dutch scientists to prove the point.

Here’s a schematic view on how this works:


They took 200 PlayStation3’s to do all the calculations for three days long, since a PlayStation has 40 times more CPU power than an average PC. Apart from the fact that I find it weird that these powerful CPU’s are not in normal PC’s, it is quite a remarkable accomplishment.

Fortunately, not all certificates are encrypted using MD5. Several suppliers use SHA1 or higher to sign certificates. Although SHA1 is allegedly doomed as well, for now this seems to be the secure alternative to MD5. BackupAgent’s preferred CA, Comodo, works with SHA1.

I strongly recommend all our partners to check the encryption type of the SSL certificate. Here is how to do that: http://blogs.technet.com/swi/archive/2008/12/30/information-regarding-md5-collisions-problem.aspx