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...

Security Analysis of Threema

A group of Swiss researchers have published an impressive security analysis of Threema. We provide an extensive cryptographic analysis of Threema, a Swiss-based encrypted messaging application with more than 10 million users and 7000 corporate customers. We present seven different attacks against...

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...

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...

When AIs Start Hacking

If you dont have enough to worry about already, consider a world where AIs are hackers. Hacking is as old as humanity. We are creative problem solvers. We exploit loopholes, manipulate systems, and strive for more influence, power, and wealth. To date, hacking has exclusively been a human activit...

Wi-Fi Devices as Physical Object Sensors

The new 802.11bf standard will turn Wi-Fi devices into object sensors: In three years or so, the Wi-Fi specification is scheduled to get an upgrade that will turn wireless devices into sensors capable of gathering data about the people and objects bathed in their signals. "When 802.11bf will be...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Orders Down in Italy

COVID-19 is depressing the demand for squid in Italy. The article is a week old, and already seems almost comically quaint. 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...

Supply-Chain Attack against the Electron Development Platform

Electron is a cross-platform development system for many popular communications apps, including Skype, Slack, and WhatsApp. Security vulnerabilities in the update system allows someone to silently inject malicious code into applications. From a news article: At the BSides LV security conference o...

AT&T Employees Took Bribes to Unlock Smartphones

This wasn't a small operation: A Pakistani man bribed AT call-center employees to install malware and unauthorized hardware as part of a scheme to fraudulently unlock cell phones, according to the US Department of Justice. Muhammad Fahd, 34, was extradited from Hong Kong to the US on Friday and i...

New Version of Flame Malware Discovered

Flame was discovered in 2012, linked to Stuxnet, and believed to be American in origin. It has recently been linked to more modern malware through new analysis tools that find linkages between different software. Seems that Flame did not disappear after it was discovered, as was previously though...

Former Mozilla CTO Harassed at the US Border

This is a pretty awful story of how Andreas Gal, former Mozilla CTO and US citizen, was detained and threatened at the US border. CBP agents demanded that he unlock his phone and computer. Know your rights when you enter the US. The EFF publishes a handy guide. And if you want to encrypt your...

Letterlocking

Really good article on the now-lost art of letterlocking...

Are the Police Using Smart-Home IoT Devices to Spy on People?

IoT devices are surveillance devices, and manufacturers generally use them to collect data on their customers. Surveillance is still the business model of the Internet, and this data is used against the customers' interests: either by the device manufacturer or by some third party the manufacture...

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...

Unlocking iPhones with Dead People's Fingerprints

It's routine for US police to unlock iPhones with the fingerprints of dead people. It seems only to work with recently dead people...

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...

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...

Schneier.com is Moving

I'm switching my website software from Movable Type to Wordpress, and moving to a new host. The migration is expected to last from approximately 3 AM EST Monday until 4 PM EST Tuesday. The site will still be visible during that time, but comments will be disabled. This is to prevent any new...

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...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I'm speaking at A New Initiative for Poland in Warsaw, January 16-17, 2019. I'm speaking at the Munich Cyber Security Conference MCSC on February 14, 2019. The list is maintained on this page...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Unexpectedly Playing a Part in US/China Trade War

Chinese buyers are canceling orders to buy US squid in advance of an expected 25% tariff. 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: New Squid Species Discovered in Australia

A new species of pygmy squid was discovered in Western Australia. It's pretty cute. 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...

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...

Changes in Password Best Practices

NIST recently published its four-volume SP800-63b Digital Identity Guidelines. Among other things, it makes three important suggestions when it comes to passwords: 1. Stop it with the annoying password complexity rules. They make passwords harder to remember. They increase errors because...

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...

A Framework for Cyber Security Insurance

New paper: "Policy measures and cyber insurance: a framework," by Daniel Woods and Andrew Simpson, Journal of Cyber Policy, 2017. Abstract: The role of the insurance industry in driving improvements in cyber security has been identified as mutually beneficial for both insurers and policy-makers. ...

Massive Government Data Leak in Sweden

Seems to be incompetence rather than malice, but a good example of the dangers of blindly trusting the cloud...

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...

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...

NoxPlayer Android Emulator Supply-Chain Attack

It seems to be the season of sophisticated supply-chain attacks. This one is in the NoxPlayer Android emulator: ESET says that based on evidence its researchers gathered, a threat actor compromised one of the companys official API api.bignox.com and file-hosting servers res06.bignox.com. Using th...

Police Have Disrupted the Emotet Botnet

A coordinated effort has captured the command-and-control servers of the Emotet botnet: Emotet establishes a backdoor onto Windows computer systems via automated phishing emails that distribute Word documents compromised with malware. Subjects of emails and documents in Emotet campaigns are...

Google Finds 20-Year-Old Microsoft Windows Vulnerability

There's no indication that this vulnerability was ever used in the wild, but the code it was discovered in -- Microsoft's Text Services Framework -- has been around since Windows XP...

Influence Operations Kill Chain

Influence operations are elusive to define. The Rand Corp.'s definition is as good as any: "the collection of tactical information about an adversary as well as the dissemination of propaganda in pursuit of a competitive advantage over an opponent." Basically, we know it when we see it, from bots...

Hacking Instagram to Get Free Meals in Exchange for Positive Reviews

This is a fascinating hack: In today's digital age, a large Instagram audience is considered a valuable currency. I had also heard through the grapevine that I could monetize a large following -- or in my desired case -- use it to have my meals paid for. So I did just that. I created an Instagram...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Clubhook Squid Washes Up on Oregon Beach

This seems to have happened twice in two weeks. 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...

GCHQ on Quantum Key Distribution

The UK's GCHQ delivers a brutally blunt assessment of quantum key distribution: QKD protocols address only the problem of agreeing keys for encrypting data. Ubiquitous on-demand modern services such as verifying identities and data integrity, establishing network sessions, providing access contro...

Details on a New PGP Vulnerability

A new PGP vulnerability was announced today. Basically, the vulnerability makes use of the fact that modern e-mail programs allow for embedded HTML objects. Essentially, if an attacker can intercept and modify a message in transit, he can insert code that sends the plaintext in a URL to a remote...

OURSA Conference

Responding to the lack of diversity at the RSA Conference, a group of security experts have announced a competing one-day conference: OUR Security Advocates, or OURSA. It's in San Francisco, and it's during RSA, so you can attend both...

Friday Squid Blogging: How the Optic Lobe Controls Squid Camouflage

Experiments on the oval squid. 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 the Equifax Breach

Testimony and Statement for the Record of Bruce Schneier Fellow and Lecturer, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School Hearing on "Securing Consumers' Credit Data in the Age of Digital Commerc...

Bank Robbery Tactic

This video purports to be a bank robbery in Kiev. He first threatens a teller, who basically ignores him because she's behind bullet-proof glass. But then the robber threatens one of her co-workers, who is on his side of the glass. Interesting example of a security system failing for an unexpecte...

New Open SSH Vulnerability

Its a serious one: The vulnerability, which is a signal handler race condition in OpenSSHs server sshd, allows unauthenticated remote code execution RCE as root on glibc-based Linux systems; that presents a significant security risk. This race condition affects sshd in its default configuration. ...

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...

DNI’s Annual Threat Assessment

The office of the Director of National Intelligence released its "Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community." Cybersecurity is covered on pages 20-21. Nothing surprising: Cyber threats from nation states and their surrogates will remain acute. States increasing use of cyber...

Friday Squid Blogging: Jurassic Squid and Prey

A 180-million-year-old Vampire squid ancestor was fossilized along with its prey. 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...

Google’s Project Zero Finds a Nation-State Zero-Day Operation

Googles Project Zero discovered, and caused to be patched, eleven zero-day exploits against Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Windows, and iOS. This seems to have been exploited by "Western government operatives actively conducting a counterterrorism operation": The exploits, which went back to early 202...