Three-Rotor Enigma Machine Up for Auction Today

Sotheby's is auctioning off a working, I think three-rotor Enigma machine today. They're expecting it to sell for about $200K. I have an Enigma, but it's missing the rotors...

Security Vulnerability in Internet-Connected Construction Cranes

This seems bad: The F25 software was found to contain a capture replay vulnerability -- basically an attacker would be able to eavesdrop on radio transmissions between the crane and the controller, and then send their own spoofed commands over the air to seize control of the crane. "These devices...

Helen Nissenbaum on Data Privacy and Consent

This is a fantastic Q with Cornell Tech Professor Helen Nissenbaum on data privacy and why it's wrong to focus on consent. I'm not going to pull a quote, because you should read the whole thing...

Perverse Vulnerability from Interaction between 2-Factor Authentication and iOS AutoFill

Apple is rolling out an iOS security usability feature called Security code AutoFill. The basic idea is that the OS scans incoming SMS messages for security codes and suggests them in AutoFill, so that people can use them without having to memorize or type them. Sounds like a really good idea, bu...

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...

Facial Recognition Is Coming to Retail

Summary article...

Cybersecurity and the 2017 US National Security Strategy

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

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...

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...

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...

NSA Abandons "About" Searches

Earlier this month, the NSA said that it would no longer conduct "about" searches of bulk communications data. This was the practice of collecting the communications of Americans based on keywords and phrases in the contents of the messages, not based on who they were from or to. The NSA's own...

Criminal Deception in Silicon Valley

Interesting paper: Abstract: With entrepreneurial fraud cases on the rise, we investigate how entrepreneurs carry out criminal deception , employing deceptive means to defraud audiences. Analyzing court data from Silicon Valley ventures and their founders prosecuted for fraud between 2000 and 202...

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...

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...

Open-Source LLMs

In February, Meta released its large language model: LLaMA. Unlike OpenAI and its ChatGPT, Meta didnt just give the world a chat window to play with. Instead, it released the code into the open-source community, and shortly thereafter the model itself was leaked. Researchers and programmers...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Game

Netflix has a new series called Squid Game, about people competing in a deadly game for money. It has nothing to do with actual squid. 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...

Vulnerabilities in Weapons Systems

"If you think any of these systems are going to work as expected in wartime, youre fooling yourself." That was Bruces response at a conference hosted by US Transportation Command in 2017, after learning that their computerized logistical systems were mostly unclassified and on the Internet. That...

The Supreme Court Narrowed the CFAA

In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court just narrowed the scope of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act: In a ruling delivered today, the court sided with Van Buren and overturned his 18-month conviction. In a 37-page opinion written and delivered by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the court explained that the...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m keynoting the all-virtual RSA Conference 2021, May 17-20, 2021. I’m keynoting the 5th International Symposium on Cyber Security Cryptology and Machine Learning via Zoom, July 8-9, 2021. I’ll be speaking at an Informa event on...

Signal Adds Cryptocurrency Support

According to Wired, Signal is adding support for the cryptocurrency MobileCoin, "a form of digital cash designed to work efficiently on mobile devices while protecting users privacy and even their anonymity." Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of Signal and CEO of the nonprofit that runs it, describe...

How China Uses Stolen US Personnel Data

Interesting analysis of Chinas efforts to identify US spies: By about 2010, two former CIA officials recalled, the Chinese security services had instituted a sophisticated travel intelligence program, developing databases that tracked flights and passenger lists for espionage purposes. "We looked...

Zodiac Killer Cipher Solved

The SF Chronicle is reporting more details here, and the FBI is confirming, that a Melbourne mathematician and team has decrypted the 1969 message sent by the Zodiac Killer to the newspaper. Theres no paper yet, but there are a bunch of details in the news articles. Heres an interview with one of...

Oblivious DNS-over-HTTPS

This new protocol, called Oblivious DNS-over-HTTPS ODoH, hides the websites you visit from your ISP. Heres how it works: ODoH wraps a layer of encryption around the DNS query and passes it through a proxy server, which acts as a go-between the internet user and the website they want to visit...

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...

Check Washing

I cant believe that check washing is still a thing: "Check washing" is a practice where thieves break into mailboxes or otherwise steal mail, find envelopes with checks, then use special solvents to remove the information on that check except for the signature and then change the payee and the...

Friday Squid Blogging: Saving the Humboldt Squid

Genetic research finds the Humboldt squid is vulnerable to overfishing. 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...

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...

Drovorub Malware

The NSA and FBI have jointly disclosed Drovorub, a Russian malware suite that targets Linux. Detailed advisory. Fact sheet. News articles. Reddit thread...

Fake Stories in Real News Sites

Fireeye is reporting that a hacking group called Ghostwriter broke into the content management systems of Eastern European news sites to plant fake stories. From a Wired story: The propagandists have created and disseminated disinformation since at least March 2017, with a focus on undermining NA...

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...

Attack Against PC Thunderbolt Port

The attack requires physical access to the computer, but it's pretty devastating: On Thunderbolt-enabled Windows or Linux PCs manufactured before 2019, his technique can bypass the login screen of a sleeping or locked computer -- and even its hard disk encryption -- to gain full access to the...

Internet Voting in Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico is considered allowing for Internet voting. I have joined a group of security experts in a letter opposing the bill. Cybersecurity experts agree that under current technology, no practically proven method exists to securely, verifiably, or privately return voted materials over the...

Hacking Voice Assistants with Ultrasonic Waves

I previously wrote about hacking voice assistants with lasers. Turns you can do much the same thing with ultrasonic waves: Voice assistants -- the demo targeted Siri, Google Assistant, and Bixby -- are designed to respond when they detect the owner's voice after noticing a trigger phrase such as...

Companies that Scrape Your Email

Motherboard has a long article on apps -- Edison, Slice, and Cleanfox -- that spy on your email by scraping your screen, and then sell that information to others: Some of the companies listed in the J.P. Morgan document sell data sourced from "personal inboxes," the document adds. A spokesperson...

U.S. Department of Interior Grounding All Drones

The Department of Interior is grounding all non-emergency drones due to security concerns: The order comes amid a spate of warnings and bans at multiple government agencies, including the Department of Defense, about possible vulnerabilities in Chinese-made drone systems that could be allowing...

SIM Hijacking

SIM hijacking -- or SIM swapping -- is an attack where a fraudster contacts your cell phone provider and convinces them to switch your account to a phone that they control. Since your smartphone often serves as a security measure or backup verification system, this allows the fraudster to take ov...

Andy Ellis on Risk Assessment

Andy Ellis, the CSO of Akamai, gave a great talk about the psychology of risk at the Business of Software conference this year. I've written about this before. One quote of mine: "The problem is our brains are intuitively suited to the sorts of risk management decisions endemic to living in small...

Facebook Plans on Backdooring WhatsApp

This article points out that Facebook's planned content moderation scheme will result in an encryption backdoor into WhatsApp: In Facebook's vision, the actual end-to-end encryption client itself such as WhatsApp will include embedded content moderation and blacklist filtering algorithms. These...

On Security Tokens

Mark Risher of Google extols the virtues of security keys: I'll say it again for the people in the back: with Security Keys, instead of the user needing to verify the site, the site has to prove itself to the key. Good security these days is about human factors; we have to take the onus off of th...

Ghidra: NSA's Reverse-Engineering Tool

Last month, the NSA released Ghidra, a software reverse-engineering tool. Early reactions are uniformly positive. Three news articles...

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...

AES Resulted in a $250-Billion Economic Benefit

NIST has released a new study concluding that the AES encryption standard has resulted in a $250-billion worldwide economic benefit over the past 20 years. I have no idea how to even begin to assess the quality of the study and its conclusions -- it's all in the 150-page report, though -- but I d...

NSA Attacks Against Virtual Private Networks

A 2006 document from the Snowden archives outlines successful NSA operations against "a number of "high potential" virtual private networks, including those of media organization Al Jazeera, the Iraqi military and internet service organizations, and a number of airline reservation systems." It's...

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...

Secure Speculative Execution

We're starting to see research into designing speculative execution systems that avoid Spectre- and Meltdown-like security problems. Here's one. I don't know if this particular design secure. My guess is that we're going to see several iterations of design and attack before we settle on something...

New Spectre/Meltdown Variants

Researchers have discovered new variants of Spectre and Meltdown. The software mitigations for Spectre and Meltdown seem to block these variants, although the eventual CPU fixes will have to be expanded to account for these new attacks...

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...

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...

US Army Researching Bot Swarms

The US Army Research Agency is funding research into autonomous bot swarms. From the announcement: The objective of this CRA is to perform enabling basic and applied research to extend the reach, situational awareness, and operational effectiveness of large heterogeneous teams of intelligent...