Hello, welcome to the Monday, March 13th, 2017 edition of the Sands and at Storm Center's Stormcast. My name is Johannes Ulrich and that I'm recording from Jacksonville, Florida.

Let's start with a couple of emails that we got from readers last week. Last week, a reader wrote in with a problem that's not really all that

uncommon these days. And he just received a new address space allocation. But what happened

is he actually resides in New Zealand. But the address space that he got assigned was used in

Europe in the past. So a lot of geolocation databases

still registered it as Europe, which of course has the problem for his users that they can't get

access to some content that blocks them based on geolocation. With IPV4 address space being in short supply,

of course it's being reused very quickly after someone is freeing up some address space and it's

often also like in this case moved around between regions. Now what you really should do here

is make sure that your address location

databases are up to date and the same with other block lists and the like. Given that address

space may change hands, it's of course important to keep block lists up to date and not to block IP addresses indefinitely.

Current mobile phones are typically either locked with a pin or, in the case of Android,

often with a pattern that the user draws on the screen.

Researchers at the University of Stuttgart now did an interesting experiment where they tried to recover either the pin or the pattern using a thermal camera. Of course, it's pretty obvious that in principle it's possible to detect the latent heat of the finger as it touched the screen. But what's interesting here is how successful it is

and what some of the limitations are. Apparently around 30 seconds is sort of the critical time here.

So if you don't get the image within 30 seconds, then the success rate is substantially reduced. For the patterns, one thing that does

affect the success rate quite a bit is if the user has overlapping patterns where the same

line is drawn twice, then again the success rate is quite a bit lower. Doesn't affect pins as much. With pins, if you

hit the same digit multiple times, the success rate was still pretty good. Now given that the

window here is only 30 seconds, I don't think the attack is terribly practical, but some interesting countermeasures

here. The obvious one, just cover the screen with your hand that way warming up the entire

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