Zoom Lied about End-to-End Encryption

The facts arent news, but Zoom will pay $85M -- to the class-action attorneys, and to users -- for lying to users about end-to-end encryption, and for giving user data to Facebook and Google without consent. The proposed settlement would generally give Zoom users $15 or $25 each and was filed...

Storing Encrypted Photos in Google’s Cloud

New paper: "Encrypted Cloud Photo Storage Using Google Photos": Abstract: Cloud photo services are widely used for persistent, convenient, and often free photo storage, which is especially useful for mobile devices. As users store more and more photos in the cloud, significant privacy concerns...

Disrupting Ransomware by Disrupting Bitcoin

Ransomware isnt new; the idea dates back to 1986 with the "Brain" computer virus. Now, its become the criminal business model of the internet for two reasons. The first is the realization that no one values data more than its original owner, and it makes more sense to ransom it back to them --...

Apple Will Offer Onion Routing for iCloud/Safari Users

At this years Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, Apple announced something called "iCloud Private Relay." Thats basically its private version of onion routing, which is what Tor does. Privacy Relay is built into both the forthcoming iOS and MacOS versions, but it will only work if youre an...

Intentional Flaw in GPRS Encryption Algorithm GEA-1

General Packet Radio Service GPRS is a mobile data standard that was widely used in the early 2000s. The first encryption algorithm for that standard was GEA-1, a stream cipher built on three linear-feedback shift registers and a non-linear combining function. Although the algorithm has a 64-bit...

FBI/AFP-Run Encrypted Phone

For three years, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Australian Federal Police owned and operated a commercial encrypted phone app, called AN0M, that was used by organized crime around the world. Of course, the police were able to read everything -- I dont even know if this qualifies as a...

The Misaligned Incentives for Cloud Security

Russias Sunburst cyberespionage campaign, discovered late last year, impacted more than 100 large companies and US federal agencies, including the Treasury, Energy, Justice, and Homeland Security departments. A crucial part of the Russians success was their ability to move through these...

On Chinese-Owned Technology Platforms

I am a co-author on a report published by the Hoover Institution: "Chinese Technology Platforms Operating in the United States." From a blog post: The report suggests a comprehensive framework for understanding and assessing the risks posed by Chinese technology platforms in the United States and...

Virginia Data Privacy Law

Virginia is about to get a data privacy law, modeled on Californias law...

Presidential Cybersecurity and Pelotons

President Biden wants his Peloton in the White House. For those who have missed the hype, its an Internet-connected stationary bicycle. It has a screen, a camera, and a microphone. You can take live classes online, work out with your friends, or join the exercise social network. And all of that i...

Friday Squid Blogging: Searching for Giant Squid by Collecting Environmental DNA

The idea is to collect and analyze random DNA floating around the ocean, and using that to figure out where the giant squid are. No one is sure if this will actually work. 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...

Military Cryptanalytics, Part III

The NSA has just declassified and released a redacted version of Military Cryptanalytics, Part III, by Lambros D. Callimahos, October 1977. Parts I and II, by Lambros D. Callimahos and William F. Friedman, were released decades ago -- I believe repeatedly, in increasingly unredacted form -- and...

Microsoft Buys Corp.com

A few months ago, Brian Krebs told the story of the domain corp.com, and how it is basically a security nightmare: At issue is a problem known as "namespace collision," a situation where domain names intended to be used exclusively on an internal company network end up overlapping with domains th...

Failure Modes in Machine Learning

Interesting taxonomy of machine-learning failures pdf that encompasses both mistakes and attacks, or -- in their words -- intentional and unintentional failure modes. It's a good basis for threat modeling...

Mapping Security and Privacy Research across the Decades

This is really interesting: "A Data-Driven Reflection on 36 Years of Security and Privacy Research," by Aniqua Baset and Tamara Denning: Abstract: Meta-research---research about research---allows us, as a community, to examine trends in our research and make informed decisions regarding the cours...

Phone Pharming for Ad Fraud

Interesting article on people using banks of smartphones to commit ad fraud for profit. No one knows how prevalent ad fraud is on the Internet. I believe it is surprisingly high -- here's an article that places losses between $6.5 and $19 billion annually -- and something companies like Google an...

First Physical Retaliation for a Cyberattack

Israel has acknowledged that its recent airstrikes against Hamas were a real-time response to an ongoing cyberattack. From Twitter: CLEARED FOR RELEASE: We thwarted an attempted Hamas cyber offensive against Israeli targets. Following our successful cyber defensive operation, we targeted a buildi...

First Look Media Shutting Down Access to Snowden NSA Archives

The Daily Beast is reporting that First Look Media -- home of The Intercept and Glenn Greenwald -- is shutting down access to the Snowden archives. The Intercept was the home for Greenwald's subset of Snowden's NSA documents since 2014, after he parted ways with the Guardian the year before. I...

Chip Cards Fail to Reduce Credit Card Fraud in the US

A new study finds that credit card fraud has not declined since the introduction of chip cards in the US. The majority of stolen card information comes from hacked point-of-sale terminals. The reasons seem to be twofold. One, the US uses chip-and-signature instead of chip-and-PIN, obviating the...

Friday Squid Blogging: British Columbia "Squid Run" Is a Tourist Attraction

On James Island. 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...

Good Primer on Two-Factor Authentication Security

Stuart Schechter published a good primer on the security issues surrounding two-factor authentication. While it's often an important security measure, it's not a panacea. Stuart discusses the usability and security issues that you have to think about before deploying the system...

Jackpotting Attacks Against US ATMs

Brian Krebs is reporting sophisticated jackpotting attacks against US ATMs. The attacker gains physical access to the ATM, plants malware using specialized electronics, and then later returns and forces the machine to dispense all the cash it has inside. The Secret Service alert explains that the...

Google's Data on Login Thefts

This is interesting research and data: With Google accounts as a case-study, we teamed up with the University of California, Berkeley to better understand how hijackers attempt to take over accounts in the wild. From March 2016 to March 2017, we analyzed several black markets to see how hijackers...

Heart Size: Yet Another Biometric

Turns out that heart size doesn't change throughout your adult life, and you can use low-level Doppler radar to scan the size -- even at a distance -- as a biometric. Research paper to be available soon...

Bluetooth Vulnerabilities

A bunch of Bluetooth vulnerabilities are being reported, some pretty nasty. BlueBorne concerns us because of the medium by which it operates. Unlike the majority of attacks today, which rely on the internet, a BlueBorne attack spreads through the air. This works similarly to the two less extensiv...

Ross Anderson on the History of the Crypto Wars in the UK

Ross Anderson gave a talk on the history of the Crypto Wars in the UK. I am intimately familiar with the US story, but didn't know as much about Britain's verson. Hour-long video. Summary...

More on the Vulnerabilities Equities Process

Richard Ledgett -- a former Deputy Director of the NSA -- argues against the US government disclosing all vulnerabilities: Proponents argue that this would allow patches to be developed, which in turn would help ensure that networks are secure. On its face, this argument might seem to make sense ...

Forged Documents and Microsoft Fonts

A set of documents in Pakistan were detected as forgeries because their fonts were not in circulation at the time the documents were dated...

Using AI to Scale Spear Phishing

The problem with spear phishing is that it takes time and creativity to create individualized enticing phishing emails. Researchers are using GPT-3 to attempt to solve that problem: The researchers used OpenAIs GPT-3 platform in conjunction with other AI-as-a-service products focused on personali...

Defeating Microsoft’s Trusted Platform Module

This is a really interesting story explaining how to defeat Microsofts TPM in 30 minutes -- without having to solder anything to the motherboard. Researchers at the security consultancy Dolos Group, hired to test the security of one clients network, received a new Lenovo computer preconfigured to...

More Russian Hacking

Two reports this week. The first is from Microsoft, which wrote: As part of our investigation into this ongoing activity, we also detected information-stealing malware on a machine belonging to one of our customer support agents with access to basic account information for a small number of our...

Information Flows and Democracy

Henry Farrell and I published a paper on fixing American democracy: "Rechanneling Beliefs: How Information Flows Hinder or Help Democracy." Its much easier for democratic stability to break down than most people realize, but this doesnt mean we must despair over the future. Its possible, though...

Security and Human Behavior (SHB) 2021

Today is the second day of the fourteenth Workshop on Security and Human Behavior. The University of Cambridge is the host, but were all on Zoom. SHB is a small, annual, invitational workshop of people studying various aspects of the human side of security, organized each year by Alessandro...

Identifying People Through Lack of Cell Phone Use

In this entertaining story of French serial criminal Rédoine Faïd and his jailbreaking ways, theres this bit about cell phone surveillance: After Faïds helicopter breakout, 3,000 police officers took part in the manhunt. According to the 2019 documentary La Traque de Rédoine Faïd, detective units...

Friday Squid Blogging: On SQUIDS

A good tutorial: But we can go beyond the polarization of electrons and really leverage the electron waviness. By interleaving thin layers of superconducting and normal materials, we can make the quantum electronic equivalents of transistors and diodes such as Superconducting Tunnel Junctions SJT...

National Security Risks of Late-Stage Capitalism

Early in 2020, cyberspace attackers apparently working for the Russian government compromised a piece of widely used network management software made by a company called SolarWinds. The hack gave the attackers access to the computer networks of some 18,000 of SolarWinds’s customers, including US...

WEIS 2021 Call for Papers

The 20th Annual Workshop on the Economics of Information Security WEIS 2021 will be held online in June. We just published the call for papers...

Deliberately Playing Copyrighted Music to Avoid Being Live-Streamed

Vice is reporting on a new police hack: playing copyrighted music when being filmed by citizens, trying to provoke social media sites into taking the videos down and maybe even banning the filmers: In a separate part of the video, which Devermont says was filmed later that same afternoon, Devermo...

Attack against Florida Water Treatment Facility

A water treatment plant in Oldsmar, Florida, was attacked last Friday. The attacker took control of one of the systems, and increased the amount of sodium hydroxide -- thats lye -- by a factor of 100. This could have been fatal to people living downstream, if an alert operator hadnt noticed the...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: Im speaking online as part of Western Washington Universitys Internet Studies Lecture Series on January 20, 2021. Im speaking online at ITU Denmark on February 2, 2021. Details to come. Im being interviewed by Keith Cronin as part ...

IMSI-Catchers from Canada

Gizmodo is reporting that Harris Corp. is no longer selling Stingray IMSI-catchers and, presumably, its follow-on models Hailstorm and Crossbow to local governments: L3Harris Technologies, formerly known as the Harris Corporation, notified police agencies last year that it planned to discontinue...

Friday Squid Blogging: COVID-19 Found on Chinese Squid Packaging

I thought the virus doesnt survive well on food packaging: Authorities in China’s northeastern Jilin province have found the novel coronavirus on the packaging of imported squid, health authorities in the city of Fuyu said on Sunday, urging anyone who may have bought it to get themselves tested. ...

COVID-19 Risks of Flying

I fly a lot. Over the past five years, my average speed has been 32 miles an hour. That all changed mid-March. It's been 105 days since I've been on an airplane -- longer than any other time in my adult life -- and I have no future flights scheduled. This is all a prelude to saying that I have be...

Friday Squid Blogging: Humboldt Squid Communication

Humboldt Squid communicate by changing their skin patterns and glowing. 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...

Facebook Announces Messenger Security Features that Don't Compromise Privacy

Note that this is "announced," so we don't know when it's actually going to be implemented. Facebook today announced new features for Messenger that will alert you when messages appear to come from financial scammers or potential child abusers, displaying warnings in the Messenger app that provid...

NSA Security Awareness Posters

From a FOIA request, over a hundred old NSA security awareness posters. Here are the BBC's favorites. Here are Motherboard's favorites. I have a related personal story. Back in 1993, during the first Crypto Wars, I and a handful of other academic cryptographers visited the NSA for some meeting or...

Becoming a Tech Policy Activist

Carolyn McCarthy gave an excellent TEDx talk about becoming a tech policy activist. It's a powerful call for public-interest technologists...

Regulating International Trade in Commercial Spyware

Siena Anstis, Ronald J. Deibert, and John Scott-Railton of Citizen Lab published an editorial calling for regulating the international trade in commercial surveillance systems until we can figure out how to curb human rights abuses. Any regime of rigorous human rights safeguards that would make a...

Hey Secret Service: Don't Plug Suspect USB Sticks into Random Computers

I just noticed this bit from the incredibly weird story of the Chinese woman arrested at Mar-a-Lago: Secret Service agent Samuel Ivanovich, who interviewed Zhang on the day of her arrest, testified at the hearing. He stated that when another agent put Zhang's thumb drive into his computer, it...

Friday Squid Blogging: Firefly Squid Museum

The Hotaruika Museum is a museum devoted to firefly squid in Toyama, Japan. 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...