"As the 'war on terrorism' unfolds, some politicians are calling for controls on the availability of encryption software. But many computer scientists claim such moves would play into the terrorists' hands. David Adam reports."

Also in this issue of Nature: be sure to check out the articles on departing NASA chief Daniel Goldin.

Cryptography on the front line | Oct 25 Nature

In a one page commentary, "Protecting privacy and liberty", Schneier suggests: "The events of 11 September offer a rare chance to rethink public security."

Bruce Schneier in Oct 25 Nature

A new paper on reacting to (distributed) denial of service attacks, published by Micah Adler of UMass-Amherst on October 2. Worth reading; some very clever ideas are emerging on this subject.

"There has been considerable recent interest in probabilistic packet marking schemes for the problem of tracing a sequence of network packets back to an anonymous source. [...] In this paper, we introduce a new marking technique for tracing a sequence of packets sent along the same path. [...] the sequence of packets can be traced back to their source using only a single bit in the packet header. [...]"

Tradeoffs in Probabilistic Packet Marking for IP Traceback