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...

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...

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...

Brazilian Cell Phone Hack

I know there's a lot of politics associated with this story, but concentrate on the cybersecurity aspect for a moment. The cell phones of a thousand Brazilians, including senior government officials, were hacked -- seemingly by actors much less sophisticated than rival governments. Brazil's...

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...

Programmers Who Don't Understand Security Are Poor at Security

A university study confirmed the obvious: if you pay a random bunch of freelance programmers a small amount of money to write security software, they're not going to do a very good job at it. In an experiment that involved 43 programmers hired via the Freelancer.com platform, University of Bonn...

Friday Squid Blogging: New Tool for Grabbing Squid and other Fragile Sea Creatures

Interesting video of a robot grabber that's delicate enough to capture squid and even jellyfish in the ocean. 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...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Fake Squid Seized in Cambodia

Falsely labeled squid snacks were seized in Cambodia. I don't know what food product it really was. 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...

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...

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...

Cognyte Sells a Mobile Cell Surveillance Van

Yet another Israeli mass surveillance company: Made by Israeli surveillance company Cognyte, the tech simulates a mobile phone tower, which forces nearby phones to connect to it. That enables cops to keep tabs on any phones in the vicinity ­ whether they’re owned by a suspect in a case or not...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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: 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...

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...

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...

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...

Baseball Code

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

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...

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...

Detecting Drone Surveillance with Traffic Analysis

This is clever: Researchers at Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva, Israel have built a proof-of-concept system for counter-surveillance against spy drones that demonstrates a clever, if not exactly simple, way to determine whether a certain person or object is under aerial surveillance. They fir...

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...

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...

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...

AI Risks

There is no shortage of researchers and industry titans willing to warn us about the potential destructive power of artificial intelligence. Reading the headlines, one would hope that the rapid gains in AI technology have also brought forth a unifying realization of the risks--and the steps we ne...

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...

Book Sale: Beyond Fear

I have 80 copies of my 2000 book Beyond Fear available at the very cheap price of $5 plus shipping. Note that there is a 20% chance that your book will have a "BT Counterpane" sticker on the front cover. Order your signed copy here...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Lifting a Fingerprint from a Photo

Police in the UK were able to read a fingerprint from a photo of a hand: Staff from the unit's specialist imaging team were able to enhance a picture of a hand holding a number of tablets, which was taken from a mobile phone, before fingerprint experts were able to positively identify that the ha...

History of the US Army Security Agency

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

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...

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...

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: 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: 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...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Ram’s Horn Squid Video

This is the first video footage of a rams horn squid Spirula spirula . 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: Humboldt Squid Backlight Themselves to Communicate More Clearly

This is neat: Deep in the Pacific Ocean, six-foot-long Humboldt squid are known for being aggressive, cannibalistic and, according to new research, good communicators. Known as "red devils," the squid can rapidly change the color of their skin, making different patterns to communicate, something...

Customer Tracking at Ralphs Grocery Store

To comply with California's new data privacy law, companies that collect information on consumers and users are forced to be more transparent about it. Sometimes the results are creepy. Here's an article about Ralphs, a California supermarket chain owned by Kroger: ...the form proceeds to state...