3105 matches found
AI Security
Two weeks ago, I attended the unprompted AI security conference in San Francisco. It was an excellent event: three days of very dense talks about all aspects of AI security. My talk was about integrous AI, and I will post it when it is online. AI security can be divided into three broad topics...
Friday Squid Blogging: New Jurassic Squid Predecessors
News story: "Scientists discover a bizarre Jurassic 'squid' unlike anything ever seen." Scientists have identified the "fattest" belemnite ever discovered, a bizarre, barrel-shaped squid relative that lived in Wyoming's ancient seas 160 million years ago. The exceptionally rare fossils reveal a...
Pinpointing Location of Videos from Background Airplane Sounds
This is fascinating: The video describes a technique that can reveal where an otherwise unidentifiable recording was made by analyzing its audio for the faint sounds of passing aircraft. The technique is both fascinating and frightening. It works by looking at Doppler curves, which plot the way a...
AIs Hacking the Law
In both a 2021 essay and my 2022 book, A Hacker's Mind, I talk about AIs finding vulnerabilities and exploits--hacking--the legal system. Here's some demonstrations of this from Germany: Legal systems encode the foundations of social order in natural language. Similar to computer systems, the...
AI Vulnerability Finding
A comment: 3% of 'critical' software security bugs, in all of recorded history, have been found in the last month. This is on pace to find another 100,000 bugs this year alone, adding 26% more vulnerabilities to the all time total Do you realize how fucking insane that is? Yes. It is a new world...
Friday Squid Blogging: Bigfin Squid Off California Coast
Neat video: The sighting, announced September 2, marks the first time anyone has spotted a live bigfin squid, which belongs to the Magnapinna genus, in the northeastern Pacific Ocean. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered...
Bloatware in Aftermarket Auto Parts
This story is interesting: One Civic owner purchased a cheap aftermarket head unit off Amazon, and decided to have Claude work its magic on it, like it would a smart TV. What was reportedly discovered isn’t surprising, but is worth knowing about. Among the pre-installed bloatware--or spyware, if...
Studying Fraudulent North Korean IT Workers
Researchers set up a fake start-up company to study fraudulent North Korean IT workers...
Hiding Capabilities in AI Models
Interesting research: "AI Models Can Provably Hide Arbitrary Capabilities" Abstract: Capability evaluations aim to surface dangerous model behaviors before deployment, but their reliability depends on the assumption that hidden capabilities can be elicited. We show this assumption does not hold...
Bias in Qwen3-Coder Model
Interesting research: TL;DR: Chinese AI models now sit inside Western products, and some carry geopolitical triggers: tell the model who the code is for, and the security of what it writes changes. For the first time, we showed that this vulnerability lives in the model's weights, and that removi...
Friday Squid Blogging: Increasing Squid Populations
This article in Nature argues that it's due to an overfishing of predators and warming sea temperatures. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Blog moderation policy...
Compromised TLS Certificates
The Indian CA eMudhra Limited has eight TLS certificates with laughably weak private keys: The compromised eMudhra keys were defective at a level that’s challenging the imagination of many of the engineers studying the incident. A normal size for a NIST P-384 elliptic curve cryptography private k...
New Serious PHP Vulnerabilities Released and Patched
PHP maintainers have released fixes for two critical vulnerabilities: PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35 fix two critical vulnerabilities that can allow unauthenticated remote code execution. All PHP users are strongly encouraged to update immediately. Who is at risk: all PHP installations...
Workshop on Economics and Information Security (WEIS) Archive
There's a new archive of all the papers from twenty-five years of the Workshop on Economics and Information Security WEIS. Really nice resource. It's fun to reread my 2002 essay on the economics of information security...
Possible new Cellebrite iPhone Radio Zero-Day
Justin.sh is reporting on a confidential Cellebrite document that has been leaked to him: Cellebrite calls it Advanced Unlocks AU from here on, not to be confused with the "advanced unlocking services" they've marketed for years. A press release from earlier this year confirms AU is a new product...
Training AIs to Solve CAPTCHAs
Interesting research: Abstract : Vision-language models VLMs can solve visual CAPTCHAs without task-specific training, but the agents built on them approach every challenge from scratch. For such an agent, the hundredth instance of a familiar puzzle costs as much time and compute as the first...
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Before the Chicxulub Meteor Impact
New research shows that squid lived all around the globe even before the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction event. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Blog moderation policy...
Backdooring Open-Weight AI Models
This is a problem: Any open model whose weights have been edited can carry a backdoor, whether it's a task-specific fine-tune, a merged adapter or an abliterated build. We have abliterated models in the title because it's the most popular reason people download modified weights without verifying...
Measuring Human Cryptanalysis Effort
Matthew Green has a new site that tries to estimate the number of cryptanalyst-hours that have been spent analyzing different public-key algorithms: Abstract: We estimate how much public cryptanalysis each public-key assumption has received, using the literature itself as the instrument. From...
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at ATTENTION: Democracy, Rebuilt in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The event runs October 21–23, 2026, and my talk is on Wednesday, October 21. I’m speaking at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, at 5 PM ...
The Future of AI Cryptanalysis
Matthew Green has been writing a rather pessimistic series of posts about the potential for AI systems to vastly outperform humans in cryptanalysis of both symmetric and public-key ciphers. I am more optimistic than he is. That is, I have stronger faith in the over-engineering cryptographers tend...
Cyberattack on Connected Fridges in France
Another IoT cyberattack, this one in France: Hackers gained control of the software that regulates the temperatures of the refrigeration units, forcing some to warm to 50C 120F overnight, according to one supermarket chain affected. … Normally, supermarket freezers go through a short period of...
FBI Arrests Suspect in FBI-Hacking Case
In September, hackers from a group called ShinyHunters announced that they stole a trove of FBI data about its own agents. It was an intelligence disaster. Last week, the FBI arrested alternate link someone associated with that crime...
Friday Squid Blogging: I Caught a Squid
On Wednesday I spent a day fishing, on a small boat out of Gloucester, MA. We caught many cod none of which we could keep, and a bunch of hake and mackerel all of which we could keep. And…I caught a squid! Near as I can tell, it's a longfin squid, sometimes called a Boston squid Doryteuthis Ameri...
How Technology Empowers—and Imperils—Dictators
This essay was written with Seva Gunitsky, and originally appeared inForeign Affairs. Two weeks after Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in March 2022, the Russian TV Channel One editor Marina Ovsyannikova burst onto the set of the evening newscast. She held up a hand-drawn sign behind the...
Apple’s Verified Photography System
Apple just released a system called "Reference Image." It can verify the image is exactly as taken by an iPhone--new models only--without tying it to a specific iPhone or photographer. It can also verify that multiple images came from the same iPhone. Other industry solutions require a photograph...
Possible Vulnerability in Apple’s Automatic Reboot
404Media is reporting alternate link that a cyber-weapons arms manufacturer is exploiting a vulnerability in iOS to bypass its automatic reboot security feature. This is the feature that automatically puts an iPhone into a more secure state if it hasn't been used for 72 hours. The new technology ...
Another Historic Cipher Falls to AI
This one is from 1809, written by Napoleon's nephew...
Friday Squid Blogging: EU is Trying to Fight Unregulated Squid Fishing
The EU is recommending import controls to combat unregulated squid fishing in the Southwest Atlantic. I'm not optimistic. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Blog moderation policy...
Unidentified Flock Cameras in Florida
St. Lucie County in Florida discovered alt link a dozen Flock cameras whose ownership it can't identify, and that the county government had not permitted. I am reminded of the decade-old story of StingRay cell phone surveillance devices in Washington, DC, whose operators were also unknown. My gue...
How American Political Campaigns Are Using AI—and What They’re Spending on the Tools
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared inThe Guardian. New campaign finance disclosure data shines a light on which US political campaigns are using AI tools and how much they are spending on them. Candidates', parties' and committees' spending reveals that AI is...
Connected Cars Are a Surveillance Platform
Researchers at Northeastern University, in collaboration with Consumer Reports , evaluated how much modern cars spy in their drivers: The new Northeastern study shows, for the first time, data flowing among the vehicles, the vehicle apps you download when you buy your car, and third-party...
I Want Better Reporting on AI Genie Behavior
AI systems are regularly completing tasks in ways that their prompters don't want or intend. Some of them are disturbing, and some of them are dangerous. This is something I've been calling "genie behavior," because I think that really gets at the core of what's happening. I wish the popular pres...
Using Device Linking to Eavesdrop on WhatsApp and Signal
Modern messaging apps allow users to link their phone accounts to their computer desktop. Eavesdroppers are taking advantage of this capability: Apps such as WhatsApp Web and Signal Desktop allow people to use their accounts on other devices, such as laptops or desktop computers. Germany's Custom...
New Attack Against RSA
ArsTechnica is reporting on a "new" attack against RSA, one that bypasses factoring. First, this attack isn't new. The original research is from 2007. What is new is the implementation. Second, it is a forgery attack. It allows an attacker to forge digital signatures. It does not recover the...
Friday Squid Blogging: Participatory Squid Dissection in October in Tennessee
I feel like someone who reads this blog will want to go to this: Families are invited to dive into the fascinating world of marine biology during an exciting, hands-on Family Squid Dissection at the Hands-On Science Center. Designed for curious learners of all ages, this unique experience combine...
On Anthropic’s AI Misuse Report
Earlier this month, Anthropic published a long report detailing all of the Claude misuses it detected. Daniel Meissler usefully summarized the report into 117 findings. A few of the highlights: AI agents increasingly handled reconnaissance, exploitation, data theft, propaganda production,...
Malicious npm Packages That Evade Defenses
This is an impressive piece of malware. Its sophistication says nation-state to me, but there is no direct evidence and certainly no attribution...
Research on Models Engaging in Genie-Like Behavior
New paper: "Self-Jailbreaking: Language Models Can Reason Themselves Out of Safety Alignment After Benign Reasoning Training." Abstract: We discover a novel and surprising phenomenon of unintentional misalignment in reasoning language models RLMs, which we call self-jailbreaking. Specifically,...
GPT-6 Astra Breaks an Old Enigma Message
This is pretty amazing: However, the most astonishing thing about this break is that the GPT6 Astra did it entirely on its own. Carter Leffer only directed GPT6 Astra to see if it could break any of the unbroken Enigma messages published on the Crypto Cellar Research web page. After analysing t...
Reverse-Engineering Flock Cameras
Hackers captured a Flock camera and got a look alternate link at the software: While much of the automatic license plate reader's ALPR most sensitive storage remained encrypted and inaccessible, the joint analysis of the recovered data shows that software running on the device explicitly detects...
Friday Squid Blogging: On Squid Egg Sacs
Short essay about squid egg sacs. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Blog moderation policy...
Are AIs Still Struggling with CAPTCHAs?
Anthropic's recent security-incident document contains a bit about how CAPTCHAs are still frustrating Claude. In the transcript, the Claude model that is so powerful that Anthropic is gatekeeping access to it appeared to slam its virtual head against the wall solving a simple image identification...
How Candidates Could Use AI for Good
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared inThe Guardian. There are plenty of signs that AI will make all of our experiences of the US midterm elections worse. Voters have anxiety about AI's impacts on the country. Politicos are using AI deepfakes to spread lies. The...
Fake CAPTCHA Scams
New variant of an old scam: Use the framing of a CAPTCHA to get an unsuspecting user to download and run a malicious program...
25 Years of Mass Surveillance Is Enough
This essay was written with Cindy Cohn, and originally appeared inLawfare. One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 is the government-wide shift from targeted surveillance--such as individual wiretaps or pen register/trap and trace orders--to mass surveillance techniques--suc...
On the NSA’s Supercomputer from the 1960s
Really interesting story about Harvest, a specialized code breaking computer built in the 1960s by IBM for the NSA...
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking online via Zoom at a League of Women Voters event on Tuesday, September 22, 2026 at 5 PM ET. I’m speaking at CanSecWest 2026 in Vancouver, Canada. The conference runs September 30–October 1, 2026; the time of my talk i...
Using AI for Weapons Development
Last week, Anthropic released a long and detailed document describing current misuses of their Claude models. I'm still reading it, but I wanted to flag this: We identified a cell of threat actors based in northern Yemen running three weapons development programs: a guided rocket that used a...
Microsoft’s Patching
Once a month, Microsoft pushes a security update to all Windows users. Tomorrow's is a new record: Microsoft's patch for September is a doozy, with a record number of roughly 972 vulnerabilities fixed and 112 of them meeting the high critical-severity threshold. It was only two months ago that...