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: 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...

iOS XML Bug

This is a good explanation of an iOS bug that allowed someone to break out of the application sandbox. A summary: What a crazy bug, and Siguza's explanation is very cogent. Basically, it comes down to this: XML is terrible. iOS uses XML for Plists, and Plists are used everywhere in iOS and MacOS...

Homemade TEMPEST Receiver

Tom's Guide writes about home brew TEMPEST receivers: Today, dirt-cheap technology and free software make it possible for ordinary citizens to run their own Tempest programs and listen to what their own -- and their neighbors' -- electronic devices are doing. Elliott, a researcher at Boston-based...

Calculating the Benefits of the Advanced Encryption Standard

NIST has completed a study -- it was published last year, but I just saw it recently -- calculating the costs and benefits of the Advanced Encryption Standard. From the conclusion: The result of performing that operation on the series of cumulated benefits extrapolated for the 169 survey...

Cracking the Passwords of Early Internet Pioneers

Lots of them weren't very good: BSD co-inventor Dennis Ritchie, for instance, used "dmac" his middle name was MacAlistair; Stephen R. Bourne, creator of the Bourne shell command line interpreter, chose "bourne"; Eric Schmidt, an early developer of Unix software and now the executive chairman of...

On Cybersecurity Insurance

Good paper on cybersecurity insurance: both the history and the promise for the future. From the conclusion: Policy makers have long held high hopes for cyber insurance as a tool for improving security. Unfortunately, the available evidence so far should give policymakers pause. Cyber insurance...

TajMahal Spyware

Kaspersky has released details about a sophisticated nation-state spyware it calls TajMahal: The TajMahal framework's 80 modules, Shulmin says, comprise not only the typical keylogging and screengrabbing features of spyware, but also never-before-seen and obscure tricks. It can intercept document...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I'm speaking at Kiwicon in Wellington, New Zealand on November 16, 2018. I'm appearing on IBM Resilient's End of Year Review webinar on "The Top Cyber Security Trends in 2018 and Predictions for the Year Ahead," December 6, 2018 at...

Pegasus Spyware Used in 45 Countries

Citizen Lab has published a new report about the Pegasus spyware. From a ZDNet article: The malware, known as Pegasus or Trident, was created by Israeli cyber-security firm NSO Group and has been around for at least three years -- when it was first detailed in a report over the summer of 2016. Th...

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...

Adding Backdoors at the Chip Level

Interesting research into undetectably adding backdoors into computer chips during manufacture: "Stealthy dopant-level hardware Trojans: extended version," also available here: Abstract: In recent years, hardware Trojans have drawn the attention of governments and industry as well as the scientif...

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...

Using Ultrasonic Beacons to Track Users

I've previously written about ad networks using ultrasonic communications to jump from one device to another. The idea is for devices like televisions to play ultrasonic codes in advertisements and for nearby smartphones to detect them. This way the two devices can be linked. Creepy, yes. And als...

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...

Security Risks of Client-Side Scanning

Even before Apple made its announcement, law enforcement shifted their battle for backdoors to client-side scanning. The idea is that they wouldnt touch the cryptography, but instead eavesdrop on communications and systems before encryption or after decryption. Its not a cryptographic backdoor, b...

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...

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...

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...

Policy vs Technology

Sometime around 1993 or 1994, during the first Crypto Wars, I was part of a group of cryptography experts that went to Washington to advocate for strong encryption. Matt Blaze and Ron Rivest were with me; I don't remember who else. We met with then Massachusetts Representative Ed Markey. He didn'...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squids Are as Intelligent as Dogs

More news based on the squid brain MRI scan: the complexity of their brains are comparable to dogs. 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...

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...

Using Machine Learning to Detect IP Hijacking

This is interesting research: In a BGP hijack, a malicious actor convinces nearby networks that the best path to reach a specific IP address is through their network. That's unfortunately not very hard to do, since BGP itself doesn't have any security procedures for validating that a message is...

Attacking the Intel Secure Enclave

Interesting paper by Michael Schwarz, Samuel Weiser, Daniel Gruss. The upshot is that both Intel and AMD have assumed that trusted enclaves will run only trustworthy code. Of course, that's not true. And there are no security mechanisms that can deal with malicious enclaves, because the designers...

An Argument that Cybersecurity Is Basically Okay

Andrew Odlyzko's new essay is worth reading -- "Cybersecurity is not very important": Abstract: There is a rising tide of security breaches. There is an even faster rising tide of hysteria over the ostensible reason for these breaches, namely the deficient state of our information infrastructure...

The Pentagon Is Publishing Foreign Nation-State Malware

This is a new thing: The Pentagon has suddenly started uploading malware samples from APTs and other nation-state sources to the website VirusTotal, which is essentially a malware zoo that's used by security pros and antivirus/malware detection engines to gain a better understanding of the threat...

Student Cracks Inca Knot Code

Interesting...

Motherboard Digital Security Guide

This digital security guide by Motherboard is very good. I put alongside EFF's "Surveillance Self-Defense" and John Scott-Railton's "Digital Security Low Hanging Fruit." There's also "Digital Security and Privacy for Human Rights Defenders." There are too many of these...

Replacing Social Security Numbers

In the wake of the Equifax break, I've heard calls to replace Social Security numbers. Steve Bellovin explains why this is hard...

Robot Safecracking

Robots can crack safes faster than humans -- and differently: So Seidle started looking for shortcuts. First he found that, like many safes, his SentrySafe had some tolerance for error. If the combination includes a 12, for instance, 11 or 13 would work, too. That simple convenience measure meant...

Many of My E-Books for Cheap

Humble Bundle is selling a bunch of cybersecurity books very cheaply. You can get copies of Applied Cryptography, Secrets and Lies, and Cryptography Engineering -- and also Ross Anderson's Security Engineering, Adam Shostack's Threat Modeling, and many others. This is the cheapest you'll ever see...

More on the NSA's Use of Traffic Shaping

"Traffic shaping" -- the practice of tricking data to flow through a particular route on the Internet so it can be more easily surveiled -- is an NSA technique that has gotten much less attention than it deserves. It's a powerful technique that allows an eavesdropper to get access to communicatio...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Skin Is Naturally Anti-microbial

Often it feels like squid just evolved better than us mammals. 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...

AI-Piloted Fighter Jets

News from Georgetowns Center for Security and Emerging Technology: China Claims Its AI Can Beat Human Pilots in Battle: Chinese state media reported that an AI system had successfully defeated human pilots during simulated dogfights. According to the Global Times report, the system had shot down...

The Story of the 2011 RSA Hack

Really good long article about the Chinese hacking of RSA, Inc. They were able to get copies of the seed values to the SecurID authentication token, a harbinger of supply-chain attacks to come...

Friday Squid Blogging: Picking up Squid on the Beach

Make sure theyre dead. 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...

Metadata Left in Security Agency PDFs

Really interesting research: "Exploitation and Sanitization of Hidden Data in PDF Files" Abstract: Organizations publish and share more and more electronic documents like PDF files. Unfortunately, most organizations are unaware that these documents can compromise sensitive information like author...

Friday Squid Blogging: China Launches Six New Squid Jigging Vessels

From Pingtan Marine Enterprise: The 6 large-scale squid jigging vessels are normally operating vessels that returned to China earlier this year from the waters of Southwest Atlantic Ocean for maintenance and repair. These vessels left the port of Mawei on December 17, 2020 and are sailing to the...

Attacker Causes Epileptic Seizure over the Internet

This isn't a first, but I think it will be the first conviction: The GIF set off a highly unusual court battle that is expected to equip those in similar circumstances with a new tool for battling threatening trolls and cyberbullies. On Monday, the man who sent Eichenwald the moving image, John...

Scaring People into Supporting Backdoors

Back in 1998, Tim May warned us of the "Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse": "terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and money launderers." I tended to cast it slightly differently. This is me from 2005: Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, an...

Supply-Chain Security and Trust

The United States government's continuing disagreement with the Chinese company Huawei underscores a much larger problem with computer technologies in general: We have no choice but to trust them completely, and it's impossible to verify that they're trustworthy. Solving this problem ­ which is...

The Myth of Consumer-Grade Security

The Department of Justice wants access to encrypted consumer devices but promises not to infiltrate business products or affect critical infrastructure. Yet that's not possible, because there is no longer any difference between those categories of devices. Consumer devices are critical...

Surveillance as a Condition for Humanitarian Aid

Excellent op-ed on the growing trend to tie humanitarian aid to surveillance. Despite the best intentions, the decision to deploy technology like biometrics is built on a number of unproven assumptions, such as, technology solutions can fix deeply embedded political problems. And that auditing fo...