Apple's Tracking-Prevention Feature in Safari has a Privacy Bug

Last month, engineers at Google published a very curious privacy bug in Apple's Safari web browser. Apple's Intelligent Tracking Prevention, a feature designed to reduce user tracking, has vulnerabilities that themselves allow user tracking. Some details: ITP detects and blocks tracking on the we...

Apple Abandoned Plans for Encrypted iCloud Backup after FBI Complained

This is new from Reuters: More than two years ago, Apple told the FBI that it planned to offer users end-to-end encryption when storing their phone data on iCloud, according to one current and three former FBI officials and one current and one former Apple employee. Under that plan, primarily...

ID Systems Throughout the 50 States

Jim Harper at CATO has a good survey of state ID systems in the US...

New Variants of Cold-Boot Attack

If someone has physical access to your locked -- but still running -- computer, they can probably break the hard drive's encryption. This is a "cold boot" attack, and one we thought solved. We have not: To carry out the attack, the F-Secure researchers first sought a way to defeat the the...

Ridiculously Insecure Smart Lock

Tapplock sells an "unbreakable" Internet-connected lock that you can open with your fingerprint. It turns out that: 1. The lock broadcasts its Bluetooth MAC address in the clear, and you can calculate the unlock key from it. 2. Any Tapplock account an unlock every lock. 3. You can open the lock...

New iPhone OS May Include Device-Unlocking Security

iOS 12, the next release of Apple's iPhone operating system, may include features to prevent someone from unlocking your phone without your permission: The feature essentially forces users to unlock the iPhone with the passcode when connecting it to a USB accessory everytime the phone has not bee...

Musical Ciphers

Interesting history...

Another Branch Prediction Attack

When Spectre and Meltdown were first announced earlier this year, pretty much everyone predicted that there would be many more attacks targeting branch prediction in microprocessors. Here's another one: In the new attack, an attacker primes the PHT and running branch instructions so that the PHT...

Artificial Intelligence and the Attack/Defense Balance

Artificial intelligence technologies have the potential to upend the longstanding advantage that attack has over defense on the Internet. This has to do with the relative strengths and weaknesses of people and computers, how those all interplay in Internet security, and where AI technologies migh...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Pin

There's a squid pin on Kickstarter. 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 FAA Is Arguing for Security by Obscurity

In a proposed rule by the FAA, it argues that software in an Embraer S.A. Model ERJ 190-300 airplane is secure because it's proprietary: In addition, the operating systems for current airplane systems are usually and historically proprietary. Therefore, they are not as susceptible to corruption...

Is Continuing to Patch Windows XP a Mistake?

Last week, Microsoft issued a security patch for Windows XP, a 16-year-old operating system that Microsoft officially no longer supports. Last month, Microsoft issued a Windows XP patch for the vulnerability used in WannaCry. Is this a good idea? This 2014 essay argues that it's not: The zero-day...

NSA Document Outlining Russian Attempts to Hack Voter Rolls

This week brought new public evidence about Russian interference in the 2016 election. On Monday, the Intercept published a top-secret National Security Agency document describing Russian hacking attempts against the US election system. While the attacks seem more exploratory than operational ­--...

Tainted Leaks

Last year, I wrote about the potential for doxers to alter documents before they leaked them. It was a theoretical threat when I wrote it, but now Citizen Lab has documented this technique in the wild: This report describes an extensive Russia-linked phishing and disinformation campaign. It...

NSA Brute-Force Keysearch Machine

The Intercept published a story about a dedicated NSA brute-force keysearch machine being built with the help of New York University and IBM. It's based on a document that was accidentally shared on the Internet by NYU. The article is frustratingly short on details: The WindsorGreen documents are...

Security Vulnerability in a Voting System

It's a vulnerability that allows someone to recover the order of ballots cast, newly exploited with AI tools. Nearly four years since the original vulnerability was disclosed, I was still able to use it to analyze voter behavior in Georgia one of the 21 states that uses affected scanners in the...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Helps Discover New Marine Species

The Squid is a new scientific machine: One of the technological breakthroughs was the onboard use of a spinning wheel confocal microscope, nicknamed the Squid, which uses lasers to scan microscopic details of how organisms are put together. "That opens up a whole new world of exploring. We could...

Cybersecurity and the Gap Between Skill and Ability

Last week, national security agencies from the Five Eyes--that's the rich, English-language-speaking countries club--jointly released a statement warning of the increasing cyber risks of AI models: in particular, their ability to autonomously hack into systems and networks. The statement was more...

GPS As a Key Distribution Platform

This is interesting: The U.S. military has likely been quietly broadcasting codes for its global encryption network using public GPS for nearly 20 years, turning each satellite into a hidden "numbers station," according to Steven Murdoch… That means every device that uses GPS has been receiving...

AI Advertising Company Hacked

At least some of this is coming to light: Doublespeed, a startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz a16z that uses a phone farm to manage at least hundreds of AI-generated social media accounts and promote products has been hacked. The hack reveals what products the AI-generated accounts are promoting...

FBI Seizes BreachForums Website

The FBI has seized the BreachForums website, used by ransomware criminals to leak stolen corporate data. If law enforcement has gained access to the hacking forums backend data, as they claim, they would have email addresses, IP addresses, and private messages that could expose members and be use...

Rare Interviews with Enigma Cryptanalyst Marian Rejewski

The Polish Embassy has posted a series of short interview segments with Marian Rejewski, the first person to crack the Enigma. Details from his biography...

High-School Graduation Prank Hack

This is a fun story, detailing the hack a group of high school students perpetrated against an Illinois school district, hacking 500 screens across a bunch of schools. During the process, the group broke into the school’s IT systems; repurposed software used to monitor students’ computers;...

Friday Squid Blogging: New Squid Species

Seems like they are being discovered all the time: In the past, the DEEPEND crew has discovered three new species of Bathyteuthids, a type of squid that lives in depths between 700 and 2,000 meters. The findings were validated and published in 2020. Another new squid species description is...

Bypassing Two-Factor Authentication

These techniques are not new, but theyre increasingly popular: …some forms of MFA are stronger than others, and recent events show that these weaker forms arent much of a hurdle for some hackers to clear. In the past few months, suspected script kiddies like the Lapsus$ data extortion gang and...

More on NSO Group and Cytrox: Two Cyberweapons Arms Manufacturers

Citizen Lab published another report on the spyware used against two Egyptian nationals. One was hacked by NSO Groups Pegasus spyware. The other was hacked both by Pegasus and by the spyware from another cyberweapons arms manufacturer: Cytrox. We havent heard a lot about Cytrox and its Predator...

Friday Squid Blogging: Strawberry Squid

Pretty pictures of a strawberry squid Histioteuthis heteropsis. 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...

I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto

This isnt the first time Ive received an e-mail like this: Hey! Ive done my research and looked at a lot of facts and old forgotten archives. I know that you are Satoshi, I do not want to tell anyone about this. I just wanted to say that you created weapons of mass destruction where niches remain...

Zero-Click iPhone Exploits

Citizen Lab is reporting on two zero-click iMessage exploits, in spyware sold by the cyberweapons arms manufacturer NSO Group to the Bahraini government. These are particularly scary exploits, since they dont require to victim to do anything, like click on a link or open a file. The victim receiv...

Friday Squid Blogging: On Squid Brains

Interesting National Geographic article. 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...

Newly Declassified NSA Document on Cryptography in the 1970s

This is a newly unclassified NSA history of its reaction to academic cryptography in the 1970s: "NSA Comes Out of the Closet: The Debate over Public Cryptography in the Inman Era," Cryptographic Quarterly, Spring 1996, author still classified...

New iMessage Security Features

Apple has added added security features to mitigate the risk of zero-click iMessage attacks. Apple did not document the changes but Groß said he fiddled around with the newest iOS 14 and found that Apple shipped a "significant refactoring of iMessage processing" that severely cripples the usual...

Another Massive Russian Hack of US Government Networks

The press is reporting a massive hack of US government networks by sophisticated Russian hackers. Officials said a hunt was on to determine if other parts of the government had been affected by what looked to be one of the most sophisticated, and perhaps among the largest, attacks on federal...

More on the Security of the 2020 US Election

Last week I signed on to two joint letters about the security of the 2020 election. The first was as one of 59 election security experts, basically saying that while the election seems to have been both secure and accurate voter suppression notwithstanding, we still need to work to secure our...

On Blockchain Voting

Blockchain voting is a spectacularly dumb idea for a whole bunch of reasons. I have generally quoted Matt Blaze: Why is blockchain voting a dumb idea? Glad you asked. For starters: It doesnt solve any problems civil elections actually have. Its basically incompatible with "software independence",...

New Zealand Election Fraud

It seems that this election season has not gone without fraud. In New Zealand, a vote for "Bird of the Year" has been marred by fraudulent votes: More than 1,500 fraudulent votes were cast in the early hours of Monday in the countrys annual bird election, briefly pushing the Little-Spotted Kiwi t...

The Security Failures of Online Exam Proctoring

Proctoring an online exam is hard. Its hard to be sure that the student isnt cheating, maybe by having reference materials at hand, or maybe by substituting someone else to take the exam for them. There are a variety of companies that provide online proctoring services, but theyre uniformly...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: Ill be speaking at Cyber Week Online, October 19-21, 2020. Ill be speaking at the IEEE Symposium on Technology and Society virtual conference, November 12-15, 2020. Ill be keynoting the 2020 Conference on Cyber Norms on November 12...

CEO of NS8 Charged with Securities Fraud

The founder and CEO of the Internet security company NS8 has been arrested and "charged in a Complaint in Manhattan federal court with securities fraud, fraud in the offer and sale of securities, and wire fraud." I admit that Ive never even heard of the company before...

DiceKeys

DiceKeys is a physical mechanism for creating and storing a 192-bit key. The idea is that you roll a special set of twenty-five dice, put them into a plastic jig, and then use an app to convert those dice into a key. You can then use that key for a variety of purposes, and regenerate it from the...

Cybercrime in the Age of COVID-19

The Cambridge Cybercrime Centre has a series of papers on cybercrime during the coronavirus pandemic. EDITED TO ADD 8/12: Interpol report...

Adversarial Machine Learning and the CFAA

I just co-authored a paper on the legal risks of doing machine learning research, given the current state of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act: Abstract: Adversarial Machine Learning is booming with ML researchers increasingly targeting commercial ML systems such as those used in Facebook, Tesla,...

IoT Security Principles

The BSA -- also known as the Software Alliance, formerly the Business Software Alliance which explains the acronym -- is an industry lobbying group. They just published "Policy Principles for Building a Secure and Trustworthy Internet of Things." They call for: Distinguishing between consumer and...

ThiefQuest Ransomware for the Mac

There's a new ransomware for the Mac called ThiefQuest or EvilQuest. It's hard to get infected: For your Mac to become infected, you would need to torrent a compromised installer and then dismiss a series of warnings from Apple in order to run it. It's a good reminder to get your software from...

On Cyber Warranties

Interesting article discussing cyber-warranties, and whether they are an effective way to transfer risk as envisioned by Ackerlof's "market for lemons" or a marketing trick. The conclusion: Warranties must transfer non-negligible amounts of liability to vendors in order to meaningfully overcome t...

Internet of Things Candle

There's a Kickstarter for an actual candle, with real fire, that you can control over the Internet. What could possibly go wrong?...

Yubico Security Keys with a Crypto Flaw

Wow, is this an embarrassing bug: Yubico is recalling a line of security keys used by the U.S. government due to a firmware flaw. The company issued a security advisory today that warned of an issue in YubiKey FIPS Series devices with firmware versions 4.4.2 and 4.4.4 that reduced the randomness ...

Why Isn't GDPR Being Enforced?

Politico has a long article making the case that the lead GDPR regulator, Ireland, has too cozy a relationship with Silicon Valley tech companies to effectively regulate their privacy practices. Despite its vows to beef up its threadbare regulatory apparatus, Ireland has a long history of caterin...

Massive Ad Fraud Scheme Relied on BGP Hijacking

This is a really interesting story of an ad fraud scheme that relied on hijacking the Border Gateway Protocol: Members of 3ve pronounced "eve" used their large reservoir of trusted IP addresses to conceal a fraud that otherwise would have been easy for advertisers to detect. The scheme employed a...

Another Bloomberg Story about Supply-Chain Hardware Attacks from China

Bloomberg has another story about hardware surveillance implants in equipment made in China. This implant is different from the one Bloomberg reported on last week. That story has been denied by pretty much everyone else, but Bloomberg is sticking by its story and its sources. I linked to other...