Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid Washes Up on South African Beach

Fourteen feet long and 450 pounds. It was dead before it washed up. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here...

Friday Squid Blogging: Shark vs. Squid

National Geographic has a photo of a 7-foot long shark that fought a giant squid and lived to tell the tale. Or, at least, lived to show off the suction marks on his skin. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read my blo...

NTSB Investigation of Fatal Driverless Car Accident

Autonomous systems are going to have to do much better than this. The Uber car that hit and killed Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Ariz., in March 2018 could not recognize all pedestrians, and was being driven by an operator likely distracted by streaming video, according to documents released by the...

Wi-Fi Hotspot Tracking

Free Wi-Fi hotspots can track your location, even if you don't connect to them. This is because your phone or computer broadcasts a unique MAC address. What distinguishes location-based marketing hotspot providers like Zenreach and Euclid is that the personal information you enter in the captive...

The Doghouse: Crown Sterling

A decade ago, the Doghouse was a regular feature in both my email newsletter Crypto-Gram and my blog. In it, I would call out particularly egregious -- and amusing -- examples of cryptographic "snake oil." I dropped it both because it stopped being fun and because almost everyone converged on...

The Threat of Fake Academic Research

Interesting analysis of the possibility, feasibility, and efficacy of deliberately fake scientific research, something I had previously speculated about...

Software Vulnerabilities in the Boeing 787

Boeing left its software unprotected, and researchers have analyzed it for vulnerabilities: At the Black Hat security conference today in Las Vegas, Santamarta, a researcher for security firm IOActive, plans to present his findings, including the details of multiple serious security flaws in the...

Friday Squid Blogging: Fried Squid Recipe

This is an easy fried squid recipe with saffron and agrodolce. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here...

CAs Reissue Over One Million Weak Certificates

Turns out that the software a bunch of CAs used to generate public-key certificates was flawed: they created random serial numbers with only 63 bits instead of the required 64. That may not seem like a big deal to the layman, but that one bit change means that the serial numbers only have half th...

Details on Recent DNS Hijacking

At the end of January, the US Department of Homeland Security issued a warning regarding serious DNS hijacking attempts against US government domains. Brian Krebs wrote an excellent article detailing the attacks and their implications. Strongly recommended...

Cataloging IoT Vulnerabilities

Recent articles about IoT vulnerabilities describe hacking of construction cranes, supermarket freezers, and electric scooters...

Chinese Supply Chain Hardware Attack

Bloomberg is reporting about a Chinese espionage operating involving inserting a tiny chip into computer products made in China. I've written about alternate link this threat more generally. Supply-chain security is an insurmountably hard problem. Our IT industry is inexorably international, and...

Friday Squid Blogging: Dissecting a Giant Squid

Lessons learned. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here...

Speculation Attack Against Intel's SGX

Another speculative-execution attack against Intel's SGX. At a high level, SGX is a new feature in modern Intel CPUs which allows computers to protect users' data even if the entire system falls under the attacker's control. While it was previously believed that SGX is resilient to speculative...

Extracting Secrets from Machine Learning Systems

This is fascinating research about how the underlying training data for a machine-learning system can be inadvertently exposed. Basically, if a machine-learning system trains on a dataset that contains secret information, in some cases an attacker can query the system to extract that secret...

New National Academies Report on Crypto Policy

The National Academies has just published "Decrypting the Encryption Debate: A Framework for Decision Makers." It looks really good, although I have not read it yet. Not much news or analysis yet. Please post any links you find in the comments, and I will summarize them here...

Friday Squid Blogging: Te Papa Colossal Squid Exhibition Is Being Renovated

The New Zealand home of the colossal squid exhibit is behind renovated. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here...

A Hardware Privacy Monitor for iPhones

Andrew "bunnie" Huang and Edward Snowden have designed a hardware device that attaches to an iPhone and monitors it for malicious surveillance activities, even in instances where the phone's operating system has been compromised. They call it an Introspection Engine, and their use model is a...

Voting Machine Security

Last week, DefCon hosted a "Voter Hacker Village" event. Every single voting machine there was easily hackable. Here are detailed details. There should be a summary report soon; I'll add it to this post when it's published...

Leaked Russian Cyber-Operations Training Materials

This is interesting: The records describe a force-generation mechanism for several General Staff components, including the GRU, Main Operational Directorate, and 8th Directorate, which is associated with protected communications, cryptography, and information security. … The reporting also linked...

XZ Utils Backdoor

The cybersecurity world got really lucky last week. An intentionally placed backdoor in XZ Utils, an open-source compression utility, was pretty much accidentally discovered by a Microsoft engineer--weeks before it would have been incorporated into both Debian and Red Hat Linux. From ArsTehnica:...

Friday Squid Blogging: A Good Year for Squid?

Improved ocean conditions are leading to optimism about this years squid catch. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here...

Friday Squid Blogging: Best Squid-Related Headline

From the New York Times: "When an Eel Climbs a Ramp to Eat Squid From a Clamp, Thats a Moray." The article is about the eel; the squid is just eel food. But still…. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog posti...

Identifying the Person Behind Bitcoin Fog

The person behind the Bitcoin Fog was identified and arrested. Bitcoin Fog was an anonymization service: for a fee, it mixed a bunch of peoples bitcoins up so that it was hard to figure out where any individual coins came from. It ran for ten years. Identifying the person behind Bitcoin Fog serve...

Backdoor Found in Codecov Bash Uploader

Developers have discovered a backdoor in the Codecov bash uploader. Its been there for four months. We dont know who put it there. Codecov said the breach allowed the attackers to export information stored in its users continuous integration CI environments. This information was then sent to a...

More on the Chinese Zero-Day Microsoft Exchange Hack

Nick Weaver has an excellent post on the Microsoft Exchange hack: The investigative journalist Brian Krebs has produced a handy timeline of events and a few things stand out from the chronology. The attacker was first detected by one group on Jan. 5 and another on Jan. 6, and Microsoft acknowledg...

Friday Squid Blogging: Vampire Squid Fossil

A 30-million-year-old vampire squid fossil was found, lost, and then re-found in Hungary. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here...

Friday Squid Blogging: Amazing Video of a Black-Eyed Squid Trying to Eat an Owlfish

From the Monterey Bay Aquarium. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here...

Me on COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps

I was quoted in BuzzFeed: "My problem with contact tracing apps is that they have absolutely no value," Bruce Schneier, a privacy expert and fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, told BuzzFeed News. "I'm not even talking about the privacy concerns, I mea...

Kubernetes Security

Attack matrix for Kubernetes, using the MITRE ATT framework. A good first step towards understand the security of this suddenly popular and very complex container orchestration system...

Superhero Movies and Security Lessons

A paper I co-wrote was just published in Security Journal: "Superheroes on screen: real life lessons for security debates": Abstract: Superhero films and episodic shows have existed since the early days of those media, but since 9/11, they have become one of the most popular and most lucrative...

Malware Installed in Asus Computers through Hacked Update Process

Kaspersky Labs is reporting on a new supply chain attack they call "Shadowhammer." In January 2019, we discovered a sophisticated supply chain attack involving the ASUS Live Update Utility. The attack took place between June and November 2018 and according to our telemetry, it affected a large...

Friday Squid Blogging: Problems with the Squid Emoji

The Monterey Bay Aquarium has some problems with the squid emoji. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here...

More Spectre/Meltdown-Like Attacks

Back in January, we learned about a class of vulnerabilities against microprocessors that leverages various performance and efficiency shortcuts for attack. I wrote that the first two attacks would be just the start: It shouldn't be surprising that microprocessor designers have been building...

How DNA Databases Violate Everyone's Privacy

If you're an American of European descent, there's a 60% chance you can be uniquely identified by public information in DNA databases. This is not information that you have made public; this is information your relatives have made public. Research paper: "Identity inference of genomic data using...

Security in a World of Physically Capable Computers

It's no secret that computers are insecure. Stories like the recent Facebook hack, the Equifax hack and the hacking of government agencies are remarkable for how unremarkable they really are. They might make headlines for a few days, but they're just the newsworthy tip of a very large iceberg. Th...

Access Now Is Looking for a Chief Security Officer

The international digital human rights organization Access Now I am on the board is looking to hire a Chief Security Officer. I believe that, somewhere, there is a highly qualified security person who has had enough of corporate life and wants instead to make a difference in the world. If that's...

Friday Squid Blogging: Capturing the Giant Squid on Video

In this 2013 TED talk, oceanographer Edith Widder explains how her team captured the giant squid on video. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here...

Maliciously Changing Someone's Address

Someone changed the address of UPS corporate headquarters to his own apartment in Chicago. The company discovered it three months later. The problem, of course, is that in the US there isn't any authentication of change-of-address submissions: According to the Postal Service, nearly 37 million...

Ray Ozzie's Encryption Backdoor

Last month, Wired published a long article about Ray Ozzie and his supposed new scheme for adding a backdoor in encrypted devices. It's a weird article. It paints Ozzie's proposal as something that "attains the impossible" and "satisfies both law enforcement and privacy purists," when 1 it's bare...

Zeynep Tufekci on Facebook and Cambridge Analytica

Zeynep Tufekci is particularly cogent about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Several news outlets asked me to write about this issue. I didn't, because 1 my book manuscript is due on Monday finally!, and 2 I knew Zeynep would say what I would say, only better...

Reverse Engineering the Cuban Sonic Weapon

Interesting analysis and speculation...

Election Security

Good Washington Post op-ed on the need to use voter-verifiable paper ballots to secure elections, as well as risk-limiting audits...

Spectre and Meltdown Attacks

After a week or so of rumors, everyone is now reporting about the Spectre and Meltdown attacks against pretty much every modern processor out there. These are side-channel attacks where one process can spy on other processes. They affect computers where an untrusted browser window can execute cod...

The "Extended Random" Feature in the BSAFE Crypto Library

Matthew Green wrote a fascinating blog post about the NSA's efforts to increase the amount of random data exposed in the TLS protocol, and how it interacts with the NSA's backdoor into the DUALECPRNG random number generator to weaken TLS...

Confusing Self-Driving Cars by Altering Road Signs

Researchers found that they could confuse the road sign detection algorithms of self-driving cars by adding stickers to the signs on the road. They could, for example, cause a car to think that a stop sign is a 45 mph speed limit sign. The changes are subtle, though -- look at the photo from the...

Roombas will Spy on You

The company that sells the Roomba autonomous vacuum wants to sell the data about your home that it collects. Some questions: What happens if a Roomba user consents to the data collection and later sells his or her home -- especially furnished -- and now the buyers of the data have a map of a home...

AirDropped Gun Photo Causes Terrorist Scare

A teenager on an airplane sent a photo of a replica gun via AirDrop to everyone who had their settings configured to receive unsolicited photos from strangers. This caused a three-hour delay as the plane -- still at the gate -- was evacuated and searched. The teen was not allowed to reboard. I ca...

Hacking Weapons Systems

Lukasz Olejnik has a good essay on hacking weapons systems. Basically, there is no reason to believe that software in weapons systems is any more vulnerability free than any other software. So now the question is whether the software can be accessed over the Internet. Increasingly, it is. This is...

Router Security

This report is six months old, and I dont know anything about the organization that produced it, but it has some alarming data about router security. Conclusion: Our analysis showed that Linux is the most used OS running on more than 90% of the devices. However, many routers are powered by very o...