Securing a Raspberry Pi

A Raspberry Pi is a tiny computer designed for makers and all sorts of Internet-of-Things types of projects. Make magazine has an article about securing it. Reading it, I am struck by how much work it is to secure. I fear that this is beyond the capabilities of most tinkerers, and the result will...

Hacking the Galaxy S8's Iris Biometric

It was easy: The hackers took a medium range photo of their subject with a digital camera's night mode, and printed the infrared image. Then, presumably to give the image some depth, the hackers placed a contact lens on top of the printed picture...

The Quick vs. the Strong: Commentary on Cory Doctorow's Walkaway

Technological advances change the world. That's partly because of what they are, but even more because of the social changes they enable. New technologies upend power balances. They give groups new capabilities, increased effectiveness, and new defenses. The Internet decades have been a...

Why Is the TSA Scanning Paper?

I've been reading a bunch of anecdotal reports that the TSA is starting to scan paper separately: A passenger going through security at Kansas City International Airport MCI recently was asked by security officers to remove all paper products from his bag. Everything from books to Post-It Notes,...

France to Stop Certifying Non-Quantum-Safe Encryption

France is accelerating its transition to post-quantum encryption: France's cybersecurity agency ANSSI said on Tuesday it would stop certifying security products that lack quantum-resistant encryption, a move that will force government bodies and critical operators to shift away from older systems...

Hacking Meta’s AI Chatbot

Hackers are convincing Meta's AI support chatbot to let them take over other peoples' accounts: A video posted on X showed the step-by-step process to hack someone's Instagram account. The hacker allegedly used a VPN to spoof the targets' presumed location to avoid triggering Instagram's automate...

Rowhammer Attack Against NVIDIA Chips

A new rowhammer attack gives complete control of NVIDIA CPUs. On Thursday, two research teams, working independently of each other, demonstrated attacks against two cards from Nvidia’s Ampere generation that take GPU rowhammering into new--­and potentially much more consequential--­territory: GDD...

Israel’s Pager Attacks and Supply Chain Vulnerabilities

Israel's brazen attacks on Hezbollah last week, in which hundreds of pagers and two-way radios exploded and killed at least 37 people, graphically illustrated a threat that cybersecurity experts have been warning about for years: Our international supply chains for computerized equipment leave us...

LLMs Acting Deceptively

New research: "Deception abilities emerged in large language models": Abstract: Large language models LLMs are currently at the forefront of intertwining AI systems with human communication and everyday life. Thus, aligning them with human values is of great importance. However, given the steady...

Surveillance by the New Microsoft Outlook App

The ProtonMail people are accusing Microsofts new Outlook for Windows app of conducting extensive surveillance on its users. It shares data with advertisers, a lot of data: The window informs users that Microsoft and those 801 third parties use their data for a number of purposes, including to:...

Ross Anderson

Ross Anderson unexpectedly passed away Thursday night in, I believe, his home in Cambridge. I cant remember when I first met Ross. Of course it was before 2008, when we created the Security and Human Behavior workshop. It was well before 2001, when we created the Workshop on Economics and...

Hardware Vulnerability in Apple’s M-Series Chips

Its yet another hardware side-channel attack: The threat resides in the chips’ data memory-dependent prefetcher, a hardware optimization that predicts the memory addresses of data that running code is likely to access in the near future. By loading the contents into the CPU cache before it’s...

Google Pays $10M in Bug Bounties in 2023

BleepingComputer has the details. Its $2M less than in 2022, but its still a lot. The highest reward for a vulnerability report in 2023 was $113,337, while the total tally since the programs launch in 2010 has reached $59 million. For Android, the worlds most popular and widely used mobile...

Using LLMs to Unredact Text

Initial results in using LLMs to unredact text based on the size of the individual-word redaction rectangles. This feels like something that a specialized ML system could be trained on...

A Hacker’s Mind is Out in Paperback

The paperback version of A Hackers Mind has just been published. Its the same book, only a cheaper format. But--and this is the real reason I am posting this--Amazon has significantly discounted the hardcover to $15 to get rid of its stock. This is much cheaper than I am selling it for, and cheap...

Deepfake Fraud

A deepfake video conference call--with everyone else on the call a fake--fooled a finance worker into sending $25M to the criminals account...

Friday Squid Blogging: New Foods from Squid Fins

We only eat about half of a squid, ignoring the fins. A group of researchers is working to change that. 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 Privacy Disaster of Modern Smart Cars

Article based on a Mozilla report...

New Revelations from the Snowden Documents

Jake Appelbaums PhD thesis contains several new revelations from the classified NSA documents provided to journalists by Edward Snowden. Nothing major, but a few more tidbits. Kind of amazing that that all happened ten years ago. At this point, those documents are more historical than anything...

LLM Summary of My Book Beyond Fear

Claude Anthropics LLM was given this prompt: Please summarize the themes and arguments of Bruce Schneiers book Beyond Fear. Im particularly interested in a taxonomy of his ethical arguments--please expand on that. Then lay out the most salient criticisms of the book. Claudes reply: Heres a brief...

White House Announces AI Cybersecurity Challenge

At Black Hat last week, the White House announced an AI Cyber Challenge. Gizmodo reports: The new AI cyber challenge which is being abbreviated "AIxCC" will have a number of different phases. Interested would-be competitors can now submit their proposals to the Small Business Innovation Research...

The Need for Trustworthy AI

If you ask Alexa, Amazons voice assistant AI system, whether Amazon is a monopoly, it responds by saying it doesnt know. It doesnt take much to make it lambaste the other tech giants, but its silent about its own corporate parents misdeeds. When Alexa responds in this way, its obvious that it is...

Cyberweapons Manufacturer QuaDream Shuts Down

Following a report on its activities, the Israeli spyware company QuaDream has shut down. This was QuadDream: Key Findings Based on an analysis of samples shared with us by Microsoft Threat Intelligence, we developed indicators that enabled us to identify at least five civil society victims of...

US Cyber Command Operations During the 2022 Midterm Elections

The head of both US Cyber Command and the NSA, Gen. Paul Nakasone, broadly discussed that first organizations offensive cyber operations during the runup to the 2022 midterm elections. He didnt name names, of course: We did conduct operations persistently to make sure that our foreign adversaries...

NSA on Supply Chain Security

The NSA together with CISA has published a long report on supply-chain security: "Securing the Software Supply Chain: Recommended Practices Guide for Suppliers.": Prevention is often seen as the responsibility of the software developer, as they are required to securely develop and deliver code,...

NIST’s Post-Quantum Cryptography Standards

Quantum computing is a completely new paradigm for computers. A quantum computer uses quantum properties such as superposition, which allows a qubit a quantum bit to be neither 0 nor 1, but something much more complicated. In theory, such a computer can solve problems too complex for conventional...

AirTags Are Used for Stalking Far More than Previously Reported

Ever since Apple introduced AirTags, security people have warned that they could be used for stalking. But while there have been a bunch of anecdotal stories, this is the first vaguely scientific survey: Motherboard requested records mentioning AirTags in a recent eight month period from dozens o...

Friday Squid Blogging: Tentacle Doorknob

Its pretty. 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...

More on Apple’s iPhone Backdoor

In this post, Ill collect links on Apples iPhone backdoor for scanning CSAM images. Previous links are here and here. Apple says that hash collisions in its CSAM detection system were expected, and not a concern. Im not convinced that this secondary system was originally part of the design, since...

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...

Teaching Cybersecurity to Children

A new draft of an Australian educational curriculum proposes teaching children as young as five cybersecurity: The proposed curriculum aims to teach five-year-old children -- an age at which Australian kids first attend school -- not to share information such as date of birth or full names with...

More Biden Cybersecurity Nominations

News: President Biden announced key cybersecurity leadership nominations Monday, proposing Jen Easterly as the next head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and John "Chris" Inglis as the first ever national cyber director NCD. I know them both, and think theyre both good...

Russia’s SolarWinds Attack and Software Security

The information that is emerging about Russias extensive cyberintelligence operation against the United States and other countries should be increasingly alarming to the public. The magnitude of the hacking, now believed to have affected more than 250 federal agencies and businesses -- ­primarily...

Authentication Failure

This is a weird story of a building owner commissioning an artist to paint a mural on the side of his building -- except that he wasnt actually the buildings owner. The fake landlord met Hawkins in person the day after Thanksgiving, supplying the paint and half the promised fee. They met again a...

Detecting Phishing Emails

Research paper: Rick Wash, "How Experts Detect Phishing Scam Emails": Abstract: Phishing scam emails are emails that pretend to be something they are not in order to get the recipient of the email to undertake some action they normally would not. While technical protections against phishing reduc...

Interesting Attack on the EMV Smartcard Payment Standard

Its complicated, but its basically a man-in-the-middle attack that involves two smartphones. The first phone reads the actual smartcard, and then forwards the required information to a second phone. That second phone actually conducts the transaction on the POS terminal. That second phone is able...

More on NIST's Post-Quantum Cryptography

Back in July, NIST selected third-round algorithms for its post-quantum cryptography standard. Recently, Daniel Apon of NIST gave a talk detailing the selection criteria. Interesting stuff. NOTE: We're in the process of moving this blog to Wordpress. Comments will be disabled until the move it...

Robocall Results from a Telephony Honeypot

A group of researchers set up a telephony honeypot and tracked robocall behavior: NCSU researchers said they ran 66,606 telephone lines between March 2019 and January 2020, during which time they said to have received 1,481,201 unsolicited calls -- even if they never made their phone numbers publ...

Friday Squid Blogging: China Closing Its Squid Spawning Grounds

China is prohibiting squid fishing in two areas -- both in international waters -- for two seasons, to give squid time to recover and reproduce. This is the first time China has voluntarily imposed a closed season on the high seas. Some experts regard it as an important step forward in China's...

Another Intel Speculative Execution Vulnerability

Remember Spectre and Meltdown? Back in early 2018, I wrote: Spectre and Meltdown are pretty catastrophic vulnerabilities, but they only affect the confidentiality of data. Now that they -- and the research into the Intel ME vulnerability -- have shown researchers where to look, more is coming --...

Thermal Imaging as Security Theater

Seems like thermal imaging is the security theater technology of today. These features are so tempting that thermal cameras are being installed at an increasing pace. They're used in airports and other public transportation centers to screen travelers, increasingly used by companies to screen...

How Did Facebook Beat a Federal Wiretap Demand?

This is interesting: Facebook Inc. in 2018 beat back federal prosecutors seeking to wiretap its encrypted Messenger app. Now the American Civil Liberties Union is seeking to find out how. The entire proceeding was confidential, with only the result leaking to the press. Lawyers for the ACLU and t...

California Needlessly Reduces Privacy During COVID-19 Pandemic

This one isn't even related to contact tracing: On March 17, 2020, the federal government relaxed a number of telehealth-related regulatory requirements due to COVID-19. On April 3, 2020, California Governor Gavin Newsom issued Executive Order N-43-20 the Order, which relaxes various telehealth...

Story of Gus Weiss

This is a long and fascinating article about Gus Weiss, who masterminded a long campaign to feed technical disinformation to the Soviet Union, which may or may not have caused a massive pipeline explosion somewhere in Siberia in the 1980s, if in fact there even was a massive pipeline explosion...

Securing the Internet of Things through Class-Action Lawsuits

This law journal article discusses the role of class-action litigation to secure the Internet of Things. Basically, the article postulates that 1 market realities will produce insecure IoT devices, and 2 political failures will leave that industry unregulated. Result: insecure IoT. It proposes...

New Ransomware Targets Industrial Control Systems

EKANS is a new ransomware that targets industrial control systems: But EKANS also uses another trick to ratchet up the pain: It's designed to terminate 64 different software processes on victim computers, including many that are specific to industrial control systems. That allows it to then encry...

Details of an Airbnb Fraud

This is a fascinating article about a bait-and-switch Airbnb fraud. The article focuses on one particular group of scammers and how they operate, using the fact that Airbnb as a company doesn't do much to combat fraud on its platform. But I am more interested in how the fraudsters essentially...

I'm Looking to Hire a Strategist to Help Figure Out Public-Interest Tech

I am in search of a strategic thought partner: a person who can work closely with me over the next 9 to 12 months in assessing what's needed to advance the practice, integration, and adoption of public-interest technology. All of the details are in the RFP. The selected strategist will work close...

Distributing Malware By Becoming an Admin on an Open-Source Project

The module "event-stream" was infected with malware by an anonymous someone who became an admin on the project. Cory Doctorow points out that this is a clever new attack vector: Many open source projects attain a level of "maturity" where no one really needs any new features and there aren't a lo...

Defeating the "Deal or No Deal" Arcade Game

Two teenagers figured out how to beat the "Deal or No Deal" arcade game by filming the computer animation and then slowing it down enough to determine where the big prize was hidden...