RSA-240 Factored

This just in: We are pleased to announce the factorization of RSA-240, from RSA's challenge list, and the computation of a discrete logarithm of the same size 795 bits: RSA-240 = 12462036678171878406583504460810659043482037465167880575481878888328...

The NSA Warns of TLS Inspection

The NSA has released a security advisory warning of the dangers of TLS inspection: Transport Layer Security Inspection TLSI, also known as TLS break and inspect, is a security process that allows enterprises to decrypt traffic, inspect the decrypted content for threats, and then re-encrypt the...

More on Backdooring (or Not) WhatsApp

Yesterday, I blogged about a Facebook plan to backdoor WhatsApp by adding client-side scanning and filtering. It seems that I was wrong, and there are no such plans. The only source for that post was a Forbes essay by Kalev Leetaru, which links to a previous Forbes essay by him, which links to a...

Protecting Yourself from Identity Theft

I don't have a lot of good news for you. The truth is there's nothing we can do to protect our data from being stolen by cybercriminals and others. Ten years ago, I could have given you all sorts of advice about using encryption, not sending information over email, securing your web connections,...

Judging Facebook's Privacy Shift

Facebook is making a new and stronger commitment to privacy. Last month, the company hired three of its most vociferous critics and installed them in senior technical positions. And on Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg wrote that the company will pivot to focus on private conversations over the public...

Privacy for Tigers

Ross Anderson has some new work: As mobile phone masts went up across the world's jungles, savannas and mountains, so did poaching. Wildlife crime syndicates can not only coordinate better but can mine growing public data sets, often of geotagged images. Privacy matters for tigers, for snow...

Evidence for the Security of PKCS #1 Digital Signatures

This is interesting research: "On the Security of the PKCS1 v1.5 Signature Scheme": Abstract: The RSA PKCS1 v1.5 signature algorithm is the most widely used digital signature scheme in practice. Its two main strengths are its extreme simplicity, which makes it very easy to implement, and that...

Google Tracks its Users Even if They Opt-Out of Tracking

Google is tracking you, even if you turn off tracking: Google says that will prevent the company from remembering where you've been. Google's support page on the subject states: "You can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored." Tha...

Friday Squid Blogging: Cephalopod Week on Science Friday

It's Cephalopod Week! "Three hearts, eight arms, can't lose." 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...

Airline Ticket Fraud

New research: "Leaving on a jet plane: the trade in fraudulently obtained airline tickets:" Abstract: Every day, hundreds of people fly on airline tickets that have been obtained fraudulently. This crime script analysis provides an overview of the trade in these tickets, drawing on interviews wit...

Oblivious DNS

Interesting idea: ...we present Oblivious DNS ODNS, which is a new design of the DNS ecosystem that allows current DNS servers to remain unchanged and increases privacy for data in motion and at rest. In the ODNS system, both the client is modified with a local resolver, and there is a new...

New Malware Hijacks Cryptocurrency Mining

This is a clever attack. After gaining control of the coin-mining software, the malware replaces the wallet address the computer owner uses to collect newly minted currency with an address controlled by the attacker. From then on, the attacker receives all coins generated, and owners are none the...

Cybersecurity and the 2017 US National Security Strategy

Commentaries on the 2017 US national security strategy by Michael Sulmeyer and Ben Buchanan...

Daphne Caruana Galizia's Murder and the Security of WhatsApp

Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese journalist whose anti-corruption investigations exposed powerful people. She was murdered in October by a car bomb. Galizia used WhatsApp to communicate securely with her sources. Now that she is dead, the Maltese police want to break into her phone or the app...

Google Login Security for High-Risk Users

Google has a new login service for high-risk users. It's good, but unforgiving. Logging in from a desktop will require a special USB key, while accessing your data from a mobile device will similarly require a Bluetooth dongle. All non-Google services and apps will be exiled from reaching into yo...

Proof that HMAC-DRBG has No Back Doors

New research: "Verified Correctness and Security of mbedTLS HMAC-DRBG," by Katherine Q. Ye, Matthew Green, Naphat Sanguansin, Lennart Beringer, Adam Petcher, and Andrew W. Appel. Abstract: We have formalized the functional specification of HMAC-DRBG NIST 800-90A, and we have proved its...

Ethereum Hacks

The press is reporting a $32M theft of the cryptocurrency Ethereum. Like all such thefts, they're not a result of a cryptographic failure in the currencies, but instead a software vulnerability in the software surrounding the currency -- in this case, digital wallets. This is the second Ethereum...

The Women of Bletchley Park

Really good article about the women who worked at Bletchley Park during World War II, breaking German Enigma-encrypted messages...

Friday Squid Blogging: “Squidbleed” Vulnerability

In a rare combined cybersecurity/squid post, a twenty-nine-year-old squid proxy bug can leak HTTP requests. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Blog moderation policy...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m giving a keynote at Cybernation 2026 in Berlin, Germany, on June 24, 2026. I’m speaking at the Potsdam Conference on National Cybersecurity at the Hasso Plattner Institut in Potsdam, Germany. The event runs June 24–25, 2026, an...

Lattice-Based Cryptosystems and Quantum Cryptanalysis

Quantum computers are probably coming, though we dont know when--and when they arrive, they will, most likely, be able to break our standard public-key cryptography algorithms. In anticipation of this possibility, cryptographers have been working on quantum-resistant public-key algorithms. The...

Operation Triangulation: Zero-Click iPhone Malware

Kaspersky is reporting a zero-click iOS exploit in the wild: Mobile device backups contain a partial copy of the filesystem, including some of the user data and service databases. The timestamps of the files, folders and the database records allow to roughly reconstruct the events happening to th...

China Taking Control of Zero-Day Exploits

China is making sure that all newly discovered zero-day exploits are disclosed to the government. Under the new rules, anyone in China who finds a vulnerability must tell the government, which will decide what repairs to make. No information can be given to "overseas organizations or individuals"...

VPNs and Trust

TorrentFreak surveyed nineteen VPN providers, asking them questions about their privacy practices: what data they keep, how they respond to court order, what country they are incorporated in, and so on. Most interesting to me is the home countries of these companies. Express VPN is incorporated i...

Bizarro Banking Trojan

Bizarro is a new banking trojan that is stealing financial information and crypto wallets. …the program can be delivered in a couple of ways­ -- either via malicious links contained within spam emails, or through a trojanized app. Using these sneaky methods, trojan operators will implant the...

Friday Squid Blogging: Far Side Squid Comic

A classic. 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...

Easy SMS Hijacking

Vice is reporting on a cell phone vulnerability caused by commercial SMS services. One of the things these services permit is text message forwarding. It turns out that with a little bit of anonymous money -- in this case, $16 off an anonymous prepaid credit card -- and a few lies, you can forwar...

Mysterious Macintosh Malware

This is weird: Once an hour, infected Macs check a control server to see if there are any new commands the malware should run or binaries to execute. So far, however, researchers have yet to observe delivery of any payload on any of the infected 30,000 machines, leaving the malwares ultimate goal...

Impressive iPhone Exploit

This is a scarily impressive vulnerability: Earlier this year, Apple patched one of the most breathtaking iPhone vulnerabilities ever: a memory corruption bug in the iOS kernel that gave attackers remote access to the entire device­ -- over Wi-Fi, with no user interaction required at all. Oh, and...

“Privacy Nutrition Labels” in Apple’s App Store

Apple will start requiring standardized privacy labels for apps in its app store, starting in December: Apple allows data disclosure to be optional if all of the following conditions apply: if its not used for tracking, advertising or marketing; if its not shared with a data broker; if collection...

US Cyber Command and Microsoft Are Both Disrupting TrickBot

Earlier this month, we learned that someone is disrupting the TrickBot botnet network. Over the past 10 days, someone has been launching a series of coordinated attacks designed to disrupt Trickbot, an enormous collection of more than two million malware-infected Windows PCs that are constantly...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Proteins for a Better Face Mask

Researchers are synthesizing squid proteins to create a face mask that better survives cleaning. And you thought there was no connection between squid and COVID-19. The military thinks this might have applications for self-healing robots. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about t...

Ann Mitchell, Bletchley Park Cryptanalyst, Dies

Obituary...

Bart Gellman on Snowden

Bart Gellman's long-awaited at least by me book on Edward Snowden, Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State, will finally be published in a couple of weeks. There is an adapted excerpt in the Atlantic. It's an interesting read, mostly about the government surveillance of hi...

Emergency Surveillance During COVID-19 Crisis

Israel is using emergency surveillance powers to track people who may have COVID-19, joining China and Iran in using mass surveillance in this way. I believe pressure will increase to leverage existing corporate surveillance infrastructure for these purposes in the US and other countries. With th...

Work-from-Home Security Advice

SANS has made freely available its "Work-from-Home Awareness Kit." When I think about how COVID-19's security measures are affecting organizational networks, I see several interrelated problems: One, employees are working from their home networks and sometimes from their home computers. These...

Chrome Extension Stealing Cryptocurrency Keys and Passwords

A malicious Chrome extension surreptitiously steals Ethereum keys and passwords: According to Denley, the extension is dangerous to users in two ways. First, any funds ETH coins and ERC0-based tokens managed directly inside the extension are at risk. Denley says that the extension sends the priva...

A Feminist Take on Information Privacy

Maria Farrell has a really interesting framing of information/device privacy: What our smartphones and relationship abusers share is that they both exert power over us in a world shaped to tip the balance in their favour, and they both work really, really hard to obscure this fact and keep us...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I'm speaking at the Code for America Summit in Oakland, California on May 30, 2019. I'm speaking on "Securing a World of Physically Capable Computers" at Oxford University on Monday, June 17, 2019. The list is maintained on this pa...

Stealing Ethereum by Guessing Weak Private Keys

Someone is stealing millions of dollars worth of Ethereum by guessing users' private keys. Normally this should be impossible, but lots of keys seem to be very weak. Researchers are unsure how those weak keys are being generated and used. Their paper is here...

Oracle and "Responsible Disclosure"

I've been writing about "responsible disclosure" for over a decade; here's an essay from 2007. Basically, it's a tacit agreement between researchers and software vendors. Researchers agree to withhold their work until software companies fix the vulnerabilities, and software vendors agree not to...

Russians Hacked the Olympics

Two weeks ago, I blogged about the myriad of hacking threats against the Olympics. Last week, the Washington Post reported that Russia hacked the Olympics network and tried to cast the blame on North Korea. Of course, the evidence is classified, so there's no way to verify this claim. And while t...

Locating Secret Military Bases via Fitness Data

In November, the company Strava released an anonymous data-visualization map showing all the fitness activity by everyone using the app. Over this weekend, someone realized that it could be used to locate secret military bases: just look for repeated fitness activity in the middle of nowhere. New...

Yet Another FBI Proposal for Insecure Communications

Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein has given talks where he proposes that tech companies decrease their communications and device security for the benefit of the FBI. In a recent talk, his idea is that tech companies just save a copy of the plaintext: Law enforcement can also partner with private...

Amazon Creates Classified US Cloud

Amazon has a cloud for US classified data. The physical and computer requirements for handling classified information are considerable, both in terms of technology and procedure. I am surprised that a company with no experience dealing with classified data was able to do it...

Facebook Fingerprinting Photos to Prevent Revenge Porn

This is a pilot project in Australia: Individuals who have shared intimate, nude or sexual images with partners and are worried that the partner or ex-partner might distribute them without their consent can use Messenger to send the images to be "hashed." This means that the company converts the...

Security Flaw in Infineon Smart Cards and TPMs

A security flaw in Infineon smart cards and TPMs allows an attacker to recover private keys from the public keys. Basically, the key generation algorithm sometimes creates public keys that are vulnerable to Coppersmith's attack: While all keys generated with the library are much weaker than they...

On the Equifax Data Breach

Last Thursday, Equifax reported a data breach that affects 143 million US customers, about 44% of the population. It's an extremely serious breach; hackers got access to full names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, driver's license numbers -- exactly the sort of information...

Embedding Forbidden Text in Spyware to Discourage AI Analysis

At least one malware developer is adding text about nuclear and biological weapons to their spyware, in an effort to stop automatic AI analysis. Details: The index.js payload begins with a large JavaScript block comment containing fake system instructions and policy-triggering content. Because it...

TP-Link Router Botnet

There is a new botnet that is infecting TP-Link routers: The botnet can lead to command injection which then makes remote code execution RCE possible so that the malware can spread itself across the internet automatically. This high severity security flaw tracked as CVE-2023-1389 has also been us...