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...

Georgia’s Ballot-Marking Devices

Andrew Appel discusses Georgias voting machines, how the paper ballots facilitated a recount, and the problem with automatic ballot-marking devices: Suppose the polling-place optical scanners had been hacked enough to change the outcome. Then this would have been detected in the audit, and in...

Friday Squid Blogging: On Squid Communication

They can communicate using bioluminescent flashes: New research published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences presents evidence for a previously unknown semantic-like ability in Humboldt squid. What's more, these squid can enhance the visibility of their skin patterns by...

Friday Squid Blogging: New Report on Squid Markets

This report costs $2,000. Please don't buy it for me. 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...

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...

License Plate "NULL"

There was a DefCon talk by someone with the vanity plate "NULL." The California system assigned him every ticket with no license plate: $12,000. Although the initial $12,000-worth of fines were removed, the private company that administers the database didn't fix the issue and new NULL tickets ar...

Workshop on the Economics of Information Security

Last week, I hosted the eighteenth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security at Harvard. Ross Anderson liveblogged the talks...

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...

Estonia's Volunteer Cyber Militia

Interesting -- although short and not very detailed -- article about Estonia's volunteer cyber-defense militia. Padar's militia of amateur IT workers, economists, lawyers, and other white-hat types are grouped in the city of Tartu, about 65 miles from the Russian border, and in the capital,...

Hiding Secret Messages in Fingerprints

This is a fun steganographic application: hiding a message in a fingerprint image. Can't see any real use for it, but that's okay...

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...

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: Extinct Relatives of Squid

Interesting fossils. Note that a poster is available. 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...

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...

Baseball Code

Info on the coded signals used by the Colorado Rockies...

History of the US Army Security Agency

Interesting history.pdf of the US Army Security Agency in the early years of Cold War Germany...

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...

Israeli Scientists Accidentally Reveal Classified Information

According to this story non-paywall English version here, Israeli scientists released some information to the public they shouldn't have. Defense establishment officials are now trying to erase any trace of the secret information from the web, but they have run into difficulties because the...

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...

Cybercriminals Infiltrating E-Mail Networks to Divert Large Customer Payments

There's a new criminal tactic involving hacking an e-mail account of a company that handles high-value transactions and diverting payments. Here it is in real estate: The scam generally works like this: Hackers find an opening into a title company's or realty agent's email account, track upcoming...

GPS Spoofing Attacks

Wired has a story about a possible GPS spoofing attack by Russia: After trawling through AIS data from recent years, evidence of spoofing becomes clear. Goward says GPS data has placed ships at three different airports and there have been other interesting anomalies. "We would find very large oil...

ISO Rejects NSA Encryption Algorithms

The ISO has decided not to approve two NSA-designed block encryption algorithms: Speck and Simon. It's because the NSA is not trusted to put security ahead of surveillance: A number of them voiced their distrust in emails to one another, seen by Reuters, and in written comments that are part of t...

Insider Attack on Lottery Software

Eddie Tipton, a programmer for the Multi-State Lottery Association, secretly installed software that allowed him to predict jackpots. What's surprising to me is how many lotteries don't use real random number generators. What happened to picking golf balls out of wind-blown steel cages on...

Penetrating a Casino's Network through an Internet-Connected Fish Tank

Attackers used a vulnerability in an Internet-connected fish tank to successfully penetrate a casino's network. BoingBoing post...

DNI Wants Research into Secure Multiparty Computation

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity IARPA is soliciting proposals for research projects in secure multiparty computation: Specifically of interest is computing on data belonging to different -- potentially mutually distrusting -- parties, which are unwilling or unable e.g., due t...

New Bluetooth Attack

New attack breaks forward secrecy in Bluetooth. Three news articles: BLUFFS is a series of exploits targeting Bluetooth, aiming to break Bluetooth sessions forward and future secrecy, compromising the confidentiality of past and future communications between devices. This is achieved by exploitin...

Hiding Malware in ML Models

Interesting research: "EvilModel: Hiding Malware Inside of Neural Network Models". Abstract: Delivering malware covertly and detection-evadingly is critical to advanced malware campaigns. In this paper, we present a method that delivers malware covertly and detection-evadingly through neural...

Friday Squid Blogging: Video of Giant Squid Hunting Prey

Fantastic video of a giant squid hunting at depths between 1,827 and 3,117 feet. This is a follow-on from this post. 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: On Squid Coloration

Nice excerpt from Martin Wallins book 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...

Cybersecurity Experts to Follow on Twitter

Security Boulevard recently listed the "Top-21 Cybersecurity Experts You Must Follow on Twitter in 2021." I came in at 7. I thought that was pretty good, especially since I never tweet. My Twitter feed just mirrors my blog. If you are one of the 134K people who read me from Twitter, "hi."...

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...

Massive Brazilian Data Breach

I think this is the largest data breach of all time: 220 million people. Lots more stories are in Portuguese...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I'll be at RSA Conference 2020 in San Francisco. On Wednesday, February 26, at 2:50 PM, I'll be part of a panel on "How to Reduce Supply Chain Risk: Lessons from Efforts to Block Huawei." On Thursday, February 27, at 9:20 AM, I'm...

Friday Squid Blogging: T-Shirt

"Squid Pro Quo" T-shirt. 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: Squid Skin "Inspires" New Thermal Sheeting

Researchers are making space blankets using technology based on squid skin. Honestly, it's hard to tell how much squid is actually involved in this invention. 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...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Watch Squid Change Colors

This is an amazing short video of a squid -- I don't know the species -- changing its color instantly. 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...

Detecting Phishing Sites with Machine Learning

Really interesting article: A trained eye or even a not-so-trained one can discern when something phishy is going on with a domain or subdomain name. There are search tools, such as Censys.io, that allow humans to specifically search through the massive pile of certificate log entries for sites...

Friday Squid Blogging: Antifungal Squid-Egg Coating

The Hawaiian bobtail squid coats its eggs with antifungal bacteria. 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...

The NSA's Domestic Surveillance Centers

The Intercept has a long story about the NSA's domestic interception points. Includes some new Snowden documents...

Thomas Dullien on Complexity and Security

For many years, I have said that complexity is the worst enemy of security. At CyCon earlier this month, Thomas Dullien gave an excellent talk on the subject with far more detail than I've ever provided. Video. Slides...

Unfixable Automobile Computer Security Vulnerability

There is an unpatchable vulnerability that affects most modern cars. It's buried in the Controller Area Network CAN: Researchers say this flaw is not a vulnerability in the classic meaning of the word. This is because the flaw is more of a CAN standard design choice that makes it unpatchable...

Password Masking

Slashdot asks if password masking -- replacing password characters with asterisks as you type them -- is on the way out. I don't know if that's true, but I would be happy to see it go. Shoulder surfing, the threat is defends against, is largely nonexistent. And it is becoming harder to type in...

Breaking RSA through Insufficiently Random Primes

Basically, the SafeZone library doesnt sufficiently randomize the two prime numbers it used to generate RSA keys. Theyre too close to each other, which makes them vulnerable to recovery. There arent many weak keys out there, but there are some: So far, Böck has identified only a handful of keys i...

Using “Master Faces” to Bypass Face-Recognition Authenticating Systems

Fascinating research: "Generating Master Faces for Dictionary Attacks with a Network-Assisted Latent Space Evolution." Abstract: A master face is a face image that passes face-based identity-authentication for a large portion of the population. These faces can be used to impersonate, with a high...

Vulnerability in the Kaspersky Password Manager

A vulnerability just patched in the random number generator used in the Kaspersky Password Manager resulted in easily guessable passwords: The password generator included in Kaspersky Password Manager had several problems. The most critical one is that it used a PRNG not suited for cryptographic...

Friday Squid Blogging: 500-Million-Year-Old Cephalopod

The oldest known cephalopod -- the ancestor of all modern octopuses, squid, cuttlefish and nautiluses -- is 500 million years old. 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...

Fast Random Bit Generation

Science has a paper and commentary on generating 250 random terabits per second with a laser. I dont know how cryptographically secure they are, but that can be cleaned up with something like Fortuna. EDITED TO ADD 3/12: Here are free versions of the paper and the commentary...

Dependency Confusion: Another Supply-Chain Vulnerability

Alex Birsan writes about being able to install malware into proprietary corporate software by naming the code files to be identical to internal corporate code files. From a ZDNet article: Today, developers at small or large companies use package managers to download and import libraries that are...

On Vulnerability-Adjacent Vulnerabilities

At the virtual Enigma Conference, Googles Project Zeros Maggie Stone gave a talk about zero-day exploits in the wild. In it, she talked about how often vendors fix vulnerabilities only to have the attackers tweak their exploits to work again. From a MIT Technology Review article: Soon after they...