SIKE Broken

SIKE is one of the new algorithms that NIST recently added to the post-quantum cryptography competition. It was just broken, really badly. We present an efficient key recovery attack on the Supersingular Isogeny Diffie­-Hellman protocol SIDH, based on a "glue-and-split" theorem due to Kani. Our...

Peloton Vulnerability Found and Fixed

Researchers have discovered a vulnerability in Peloton stationary bicycles, one that would give the attacker complete control over the device. The attack requires physical access to the Peloton, so its not really a practical attack. President Bidens Peloton was not in danger...

NSA on Authentication Hacks (Related to SolarWinds Breach)

The NSA has published an advisory outlining how "malicious cyber actors" are "are manipulating trust in federated authentication environments to access protected data in the cloud." This is related to the SolarWinds hack I have previously written about, and represents one of the techniques the SV...

Enigma Machine Recovered from the Baltic Sea

Neat story: German divers searching the Baltic Sea for discarded fishing nets have stumbled upon a rare Enigma cipher machine used by the Nazi military during World War Two which they believe was thrown overboard from a scuttled submarine. Thinking they had discovered a typewriter entangled in a...

Friday Squid Blogging: How Squid Survive Freezing, Oxygen-Deprived Waters

Lots of interesting genetic details. 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...

EncroChat Hacked by Police

French police hacked EncroChat secure phones, which are widely used by criminals: Encrochat's phones are essentially modified Android devices, with some models using the "BQ Aquaris X2," an Android handset released in 2018 by a Spanish electronics company, according to the leaked documents...

AI and Cybersecurity

Ben Buchanan has written "A National Security Research Agenda for Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence." It's really good -- well worth reading...

Facial Recognition for People Wearing Masks

The Chinese facial recognition company Hanwang claims it can recognize people wearing masks: The company now says its masked facial recognition program has reached 95 percent accuracy in lab tests, and even claims that it is more accurate in real life, where its cameras take multiple photos of a...

The US National Cyber Strategy

Last month, the White House released the "National Cyber Strategy of the United States of America. I generally don't have much to say about these sorts of documents. They're filled with broad generalities. Who can argue with: Defend the homeland by protecting networks, systems, functions, and dat...

Identifying People by Metadata

Interesting research: "You are your Metadata: Identification and Obfuscation of Social Media Users using Metadata Information," by Beatrice Perez, Mirco Musolesi, and Gianluca Stringhini. Abstract: Metadata are associated to most of the information we produce in our daily interactions and...

Recovering Keyboard Inputs through Thermal Imaging

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, are able to recover user passwords by way of thermal imaging. The tech is pretty straightforward, but it's interesting to think about the types of scenarios in which it might be pulled off. Abstract: As a warm-blooded mammalian species, we huma...

PROPagate Code Injection Seen in the Wild

Last year, researchers wrote about a new Windows code injection technique called PROPagate. Last week, it was first seen in malware: This technique abuses the SetWindowsSubclass function -- a process used to install or update subclass windows running on the system -- and can be used to modify the...

White House Eliminates Cybersecurity Position

The White House has eliminated the cybersecurity coordinator position. This seems like a spectacularly bad idea...

Critical PGP Vulnerability

EFF is reporting that a critical vulnerability has been discovered in PGP and S/MIME. No details have been published yet, but one of the researchers wrote: We'll publish critical vulnerabilities in PGP/GPG and S/MIME email encryption on 2018-05-15 07:00 UTC. They might reveal the plaintext of...

The 600+ Companies PayPal Shares Your Data With

One of the effects of GDPR -- the new EU General Data Protection Regulation -- is that we're all going to be learning a lot more about who collects our data and what they do with it. Consider PayPal, that just released a list of over 600 companies they share customer data with. Here's a good...

Skygofree: New Government Malware for Android

Kaspersky Labs is reporting on a new piece of sophisticated malware: We observed many web landing pages that mimic the sites of mobile operators and which are used to spread the Android implants. These domains have been registered by the attackers since 2015. According to our telemetry, that was...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Populations Are Exploding

New research: "Global proliferation of cephalopods" Summary: Human activities have substantially changed the world's oceans in recent decades, altering marine food webs, habitats and biogeochemical processes. Cephalopods squid, cuttlefish and octopuses have a unique set of biological traits,...

Mozilla's Guide to Privacy-Aware Christmas Shopping

Mozilla reviews the privacy practices of Internet-connected toys, home accessories, exercise equipment, and more...

Hacking a Gene Sequencer by Encoding Malware in a DNA Strand

One of the common ways to hack a computer is to mess with its input data. That is, if you can feed the computer data that it interprets -- or misinterprets -- in a particular way, you can trick the computer into doing things that it wasn't intended to do. This is basically what a buffer overflow...

What’s the Scam?

To subscribe to my monthly email newsletter, you have to enter your information on the webpage, and then reply to an automatically generated email. This is, of course, to prevent people from subscribing addresses other than their own. Starting last weekend, I have been receiving a lot of individu...

Friday Squid Blogging: Neon Flying Squid

The neon flying squid can fly in formation. The shoal of about 100 squid rose unexpectedly from a patch of the Pacific Ocean around 370 miles from Tokyo and glided near the boat for about 30 metres. The astonished researchers were the first to capture photographs of such a thing, which looked lik...

DOGE as a National Cyberattack

In the span of just weeks, the US government has experienced what may be the most consequential security breach in its history--not through a sophisticated cyberattack or an act of foreign espionage, but through official orders by a billionaire with a poorly defined government role. And the...

The Hacking of Culture and the Creation of Socio-Technical Debt

Culture is increasingly mediated through algorithms. These algorithms have splintered the organization of culture, a result of states and tech companies vying for influence over mass audiences. One byproduct of this splintering is a shift from imperfect but broad cultural narratives to a...

Another Chrome Vulnerability

Google has patched another Chrome zero-day: On Thursday, Google said an anonymous source notified it of the vulnerability. The vulnerability carries a severity rating of 8.8 out of 10. In response, Google said, it would be releasing versions 124.0.6367.201/.202 for macOS and Windows and...

T-Mobile Data Breach

Its a big one: As first reported by Motherboard on Sunday, someone on the dark web claims to have obtained the data of 100 million from T-Mobiles servers and is selling a portion of it on an underground forum for 6 bitcoin, about $280,000. The trove includes not only names, phone numbers, and...

Apple Adds a Backdoor to iMessage and iCloud Storage

Apples announcement that its going to start scanning photos for child abuse material is a big deal. Here are five news stories. I have been following the details, and discussing it in several different email lists. I dont have time right now to delve into the details, but wanted to post something...

AIs and Fake Comments

This month, the New York state attorney general issued a report on a scheme by "U.S. Companies and Partisans to Hack Democracy." This wasn’t another attempt by Republicans to make it harder for Black people and urban residents to vote. It was a concerted attack on another core element of US...

Manipulating Systems Using Remote Lasers

Many systems are vulnerable: Researchers at the time said that they were able to launch inaudible commands by shining lasers -- from as far as 360 feet -- at the microphones on various popular voice assistants, including Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Facebook Portal, and Google Assistant. … They...

Swiss-Swedish Diplomatic Row Over Crypto AG

Previously I have written about the Swedish-owned Swiss-based cryptographic hardware company: Crypto AG. It was a CIA-owned Cold War operation for decades. Today it is called Crypto International, still based in Switzerland but owned by a Swedish company. Its back in the news: Late last week,...

On Executive Order 12333

Mark Jaycox has written a long article on the US Executive Order 12333: "No Oversight, No Limits, No Worries: A Primer on Presidential Spying and Executive Order 12,333": Abstract: Executive Order 12,333 "EO 12333" is a 1980s Executive Order signed by President Ronald Reagan that, among other...

The Third Edition of Ross Anderson’s Security Engineering

Ross Andersons fantastic textbook, Security Engineering, will have a third edition. The book wont be published until December, but Ross has been making drafts of the chapters available online as he finishes them. Now that the book is completed, I expect the publisher to make him take the drafts o...

Identifying a Person Based on a Photo, LinkedIn and Etsy Profiles, and Other Internet Bread Crumbs

Interesting story of how the police can identify someone by following the evidence chain from website to website. According to filings in Blumenthal's case, FBI agents had little more to go on when they started their investigation than the news helicopter footage of the woman setting the police c...

Ramsey Malware

A new malware, called Ramsey, can jump air gaps: ESET said they've been able to track down three different versions of the Ramsay malware, one compiled in September 2019 Ramsay v1, and two others in early and late March 2020 Ramsay v2.a and v2.b. Each version was different and infected victims...

Vulnerability Finding Using Machine Learning

Microsoft is training a machine-learning system to find software bugs: At Microsoft, 47,000 developers generate nearly 30 thousand bugs a month. These items get stored across over 100 AzureDevOps and GitHub repositories. To better label and prioritize bugs at that scale, we couldn't just apply mo...

Contact Tracing COVID-19 Infections via Smartphone Apps

Google and Apple have announced a joint project to create a privacy-preserving COVID-19 contact tracing app. Details, such as we have them, are here. It's similar to the app being developed at MIT, and similar to others being described and developed elsewhere. It's nice seeing the privacy...

CIA Dirty Laundry Aired

Joshua Schulte, the CIA employee standing trial for leaking the Wikileaks Vault 7 CIA hacking tools, maintains his innocence. And during the trial, a lot of shoddy security and sysadmin practices are coming out: All this raises a question, though: just how bad is the CIA's security that it wasn't...

Modern Mass Surveillance: Identify, Correlate, Discriminate

Communities across the United States are starting to ban facial recognition technologies. In May of last year, San Francisco banned facial recognition; the neighboring city of Oakland soon followed, as did Somerville and Brookline in Massachusetts a statewide ban may follow. In December, San Dieg...

International Spy Museum Reopens

The International Spy Museum has reopened in Washington, DC...

Towards an Information Operations Kill Chain

Cyberattacks don't magically happen; they involve a series of steps. And far from being helpless, defenders can disrupt the attack at any of those steps. This framing has led to something called the "cybersecurity kill chain": a way of thinking about cyber defense in terms of disrupting the...

Buying Used Voting Machines on eBay

This is not surprising: This year, I bought two more machines to see if security had improved. To my dismay, I discovered that the newer model machines -- those that were used in the 2016 election -- are running Windows CE and have USB ports, along with other components, that make them even easie...

Major Tech Companies Finally Endorse Federal Privacy Regulation

The major tech companies, scared that states like California might impose actual privacy regulations, have now decided that they can better lobby the federal government for much weaker national legislation that will preempt any stricter state measures. I'm sure they'll still do all they can to...

New Ways to Track Internet Browsing

Interesting research on web tracking: "Who Left Open the Cookie Jar? A Comprehensive Evaluation of Third-Party Cookie Policies: Abstract: Nowadays, cookies are the most prominent mechanism to identify and authenticate users on the Internet. Although protected by the Same Origin Policy, popular...

COPPA Compliance

Interesting research: "'Won't Somebody Think of the Children?' Examining COPPA Compliance at Scale": Abstract: We present a scalable dynamic analysis framework that allows for the automatic evaluation of the privacy behaviors of Android apps. We use our system to analyze mobile apps' compliance...

Cybersecurity Insurance

Good article about how difficult it is to insure an organization against Internet attacks, and how expensive the insurance is. Companies like retailers, banks, and healthcare providers began seeking out cyberinsurance in the early 2000s, when states first passed data breach notification laws. But...

Daniel Miessler on My Writings about IoT Security

Daniel Miessler criticizes my writings about IoT security: I know it's super cool to scream about how IoT is insecure, how it's dumb to hook up everyday objects like houses and cars and locks to the internet, how bad things can get, and I know it's fun to be invited to talk about how everything i...

Acoustical Attacks against Hard Drives

Interesting destructive attack: "Acoustic Denial of Service Attacks on HDDs": Abstract: Among storage components, hard disk drives HDDs have become the most commonly-used type of non-volatile storage due to their recent technological advances, including, enhanced energy efficacy and...

CSE Releases Malware Analysis Tool

The Communications Security Establishment of Canada -- basically, Canada's version of the NSA -- has released a suite of malware analysis tools: Assemblyline is described by CSE as akin to a conveyor belt: files go in, and a handful of small helper applications automatically comb through each one...

Splitting the NSA and US Cyber Command

Rumor is that the Trump administration will separate the NSA and US Cyber Command. I have long thought this was a good idea. Here's a good discussion of what it does and doesn't mean...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid on a Stick at the New York State Fair

Looks tasty. 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...

Factoring RSA Keys with Many Zeros

Interesting research on a new class of weak RSA keys: keys with lots of zeros. It turns out that these keys are out in the wild. The badkeys project is an open-source service that checks public keys for known vulnerabilities. While developing this tool, Hanno collected a massive number of...