Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: Im speaking at swampUP 2023 in San Jose, California, on September 13, 2023 at 11:35 AM PT. The list is maintained on this page...

Hacking Food Labeling Laws

This article talks about new Mexican laws about food labeling, and the lengths to which food manufacturers are going to ensure that they are not effective. There are the typical high-pressure lobbying tactics and lawsuits. But theres also examples of companies hacking the laws: Companies like...

Using Machine Learning to Detect Keystrokes

Researchers have trained a ML model to detect keystrokes by sound with 95% accuracy. "A Practical Deep Learning-Based Acoustic Side Channel Attack on Keyboards" Abstract: With recent developments in deep learning, the ubiquity of microphones and the rise in online services via personal devices,...

Fooling an AI Article Writer

World of Warcraft players wrote about a fictional game element, "Glorbo," on a subreddit for the game, trying to entice an AI bot to write an article about it. It worked: And it…worked. Zleague auto-published a post titled "World of Warcraft Players Excited For Glorbo’s Introduction." … That is…a...

The AI Dividend

For four decades, Alaskans have opened their mailboxes to find checks waiting for them, their cut of the black gold beneath their feet. This is Alaskas Permanent Fund, funded by the states oil revenues and paid to every Alaskan each year. Were now in a different sort of resource rush, with...

The Password Game

Amusing parody of password rules. BoingBoing: For example, at a certain level, your password must include todays Wordle answer. And then theres rule 27: "At least 50% of your password must be in the Wingdings font." EDITED TO ADD 7/13: Here are all the rules...

Ethical Problems in Computer Security

Tadayoshi Kohno, Yasemin Acar, and Wulf Loh wrote excellent paper on ethical thinking within the computer security community: "Ethical Frameworks and Computer Security Trolley Problems: Foundations for Conversation": Abstract: The computer security research community regularly tackles ethical...

Using the iPhone Recovery Key to Lock Owners Out of Their iPhones

This a good example of a security feature that can sometimes harm security: Apple introduced the optional recovery key in 2020 to protect users from online hackers. Users who turn on the recovery key, a unique 28-digit code, must provide it when they want to reset their Apple ID password. iPhone...

EFF on the UN Cybercrime Treaty

EFF has a good explainer on the problems with the new UN Cybercrime Treaty, currently being negotiated in Vienna. The draft treaty has the potential to rewrite criminal laws around the world, possibly adding over 30 criminal offenses and new expansive police powers for both domestic and...

Friday Squid Blogging: Colossal Squid

Interesting article on the colossal squid, which is larger than the giant squid. The article answers a vexing question: So why do we always hear about the giant squid and not the colossal squid? Well, part of it has to do with the fact that the giant squid was discovered and studied long before t...

Hacking Suicide

Heres a religious hack: You want to commit suicide, but its a mortal sin: your soul goes straight to hell, forever. So what you do is murder someone. That will get you executed, but if you confess your sins to a priest beforehand you avoid hell. Problem solved. This was actually a problem in the...

Mass Ransomware Attack

A vulnerability in a popular data transfer tool has resulted in a mass ransomware attack: TechCrunch has learned of dozens of organizations that used the affected GoAnywhere file transfer software at the time of the ransomware attack, suggesting more victims are likely to come forward. However,...

AIs as Computer Hackers

Hacker "Capture the Flag" has been a mainstay at hacker gatherings since the mid-1990s. It’s like the outdoor game, but played on computer networks. Teams of hackers defend their own computers while attacking other teams’. It’s a controlled setting for what computer hackers do in real life: findi...

On the Randomness of Automatic Card Shufflers

Many years ago, Matt Blaze and I talked about getting our hands on a casino-grade automatic shuffler and looking for vulnerabilities. We never did it--I remember that we didnt even try very hard--but this article shows that we probably would have found non-random properties: …the executives had...

Detecting Deepfake Audio by Modeling the Human Acoustic Tract

This is interesting research: In this paper, we develop a new mechanism for detecting audio deepfakes using techniques from the field of articulatory phonetics. Specifically, we apply fluid dynamics to estimate the arrangement of the human vocal tract during speech generation and show that...

Friday Squid Blogging: Another Giant Squid Washes Up on New Zealand Beach

This one has chewed-up tentacles. Note that this is a different squid than the one that recently washed up on a South African beach. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I havent covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here...

Tracking People via Bluetooth on Their Phones

Weve always known that phones--and the people carrying them--can be uniquely identified from their Bluetooth signatures, and that we need security techniques to prevent that. This new research shows that thats not enough. Computer scientists at the University of California San Diego proved in a...

Bluetooth Flaw Allows Remote Unlocking of Digital Locks

Locks that use Bluetooth Low Energy to authenticate keys are vulnerable to remote unlocking. The research focused on Teslas, but the exploit is generalizable. In a video shared with Reuters, NCC Group researcher Sultan Qasim Khan was able to open and then drive a Tesla using a small relay device...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squidmobile

The Squidmobile. 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...

Details of an NSA Hacking Operation

Pangu Lab in China just published a report of a hacking operation by the Equation Group aka the NSA. It noticed the hack in 2013, and was able to map it with Equation Group tools published by the Shadow Brokers aka some Russian group. …the scope of victims exceeded 287 targets in 45 countries,...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at IT-S Now 2022 in Vienna on June 2, 2022. I’m speaking at the 14th International Conference on Cyber Conflict, CyCon 2022, in Tallinn, Estonia on June 3, 2022. I’m speaking at the RSA Conference 2022 in San Francisco...

Merck Wins Insurance Lawsuit re NotPetya Attack

The insurance company Ace American has to pay for the losses: On 6th December 2021, the New Jersey Superior Court granted partial summary judgment attached in favour of Merck and International Indemnity, declaring that the War or Hostile Acts exclusion was inapplicable to the dispute. Merck...

Smart Contract Bug Results in $31 Million Loss

A hacker stole $31 million from the blockchain company MonoX Finance , by exploiting a bug in software the service uses to draft smart contracts. Specifically, the hack used the same token as both the tokenIn and tokenOut, which are methods for exchanging the value of one token for another. MonoX...

Friday Squid Blogging: Bobtail Squid and Vibrio Bacteria

Research on the Vibrio bacteria and its co-evolution with its bobtail squid hosts. 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...

Why I Hate Password Rules

The other day, I was creating a new account on the web. It was financial in nature, which means it gets one of my most secure passwords. I used Password Safe to generate this 16-character alphanumeric password: :s^Twd.J;3hzg=Q Which was rejected by the site, because it didnt meet its password...

Using Machine Learning to Guess PINs from Video

Researchers trained a machine-learning system on videos of people typing their PINs into ATMs: By using three tries, which is typically the maximum allowed number of attempts before the card is withheld, the researchers reconstructed the correct sequence for 5-digit PINs 30% of the time, and...

Hardening Your VPN

The NSA and CISA have released a document on how to harden your VPN...

Zero-Click iMessage Exploit

Citizen Lab released a report on a zero-click iMessage exploit that is used in NSO Groups Pegasus spyware. Apple patched the vulnerability; everyone needs to update their OS immediately. News articles on the exploit...

New Privacy Features in iOS 14

A good rundown...

Yet Another Biometric: Bioacoustic Signatures

Sound waves through the body are unique enough to be a biometric: "Modeling allowed us to infer what structures or material features of the human body actually differentiated people," explains Joo Yong Sim, one of the ETRI researchers who conducted the study. "For example, we could see how the...

Securing the International IoT Supply Chain

Together with Nate Kim former student and Trey Herr Atlantic Council Cyber Statecraft Initiative, I have written a paper on IoT supply chain security. The basic problem we try to solve is: how to you enforce IoT security regulations when most of the stuff is made in other countries? And our...

The Unintended Harms of Cybersecurity

Interesting research: "Identifying Unintended Harms of Cybersecurity Countermeasures": Abstract: Well-meaning cybersecurity risk owners will deploy countermeasures technologies or procedures to manage risks to their services or systems. In some cases, those countermeasures will produce unintended...

Used Tesla Components Contain Personal Information

Used Tesla components, sold on eBay, still contain personal information, even after a factory reset. This is a decades-old problem. It's a problem with used hard drives. It's a problem with used photocopiers and printers. It will be a problem with IoT devices. It'll be a problem with everything,...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I'm speaking at Indiana University Bloomington on January 30, 2020. I'll be at RSA Conference 2020 in San Francisco. On Wednesday, February 26, at 2:50 PM, I'll be part of a panel on "How to Reduce Supply Chain Risk: Lessons from...

Friday Squid Blogging: Piglet Squid Video

Really neat. 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...

Backdoors in Cisco Routers

We don't know if this is error or deliberate action, but five backdoors have been discovered already this year...

New Report on Chinese Intelligence Cyber-Operations

The company ProtectWise just published a long report linking a bunch of Chinese cyber-operations over the past few years. The always interesting gruqq has some interesting commentary on the group and its tactics. Lots of detailed information in the report, but I admit that I have never heard of...

An Example of Deterrence in Cyberspace

In 2016, the US was successfully deterred from attacking Russia in cyberspace because of fears of Russian capabilities against the US. I have two citations for this. The first is from the book Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, by Michae...

Can Consumers' Online Data Be Protected?

Everything online is hackable. This is true for Equifax's data and the federal Office of Personal Management's data, which was hacked in 2015. If information is on a computer connected to the Internet, it is vulnerable. But just because everything is hackable doesn't mean everything will be hacke...

Friday Squid Blogging: Kraken Pie

Pretty, but contains no actual squid ingredients. 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...

New KRACK Attack Against Wi-Fi Encryption

Mathy Vanhoef has just published a devastating attack against WPA2, the 14-year-old encryption protocol used by pretty much all wi-fi systems. Its an interesting attack, where the attacker forces the protocol to reuse a key. The authors call this attack KRACK, for Key Reinstallation Attacks This ...

Spear Phishing Attacks

Really interesting research: "Unpacking Spear Phishing Susceptibility," by Zinaida Benenson, Freya Gassmann, and Robert Landwirth. Abstract: We report the results of a field experiment where we sent to over 1200 university students an email or a Facebook message with a link to non-existing party...

Extending the Airplane Laptop Ban

The Department of Homeland Security is rumored to be considering extending the current travel ban on large electronics for Middle Eastern flights to European ones as well. The likely reaction of airlines will be to implement new traveler programs, effectively allowing wealthier and more frequent...

Friday Squid Blogging: Truckload of Squid Spills in Rhode Island

Ugh: A tractor-trailer rollover sent a truckload of squid spilling into a Rhode Island roadway, leaving a stench as they sat in the road for hours in the summer heat. Local authorities have dubbed it the "Squidpocalypse of '26." That would be twenty tons of squid. As usual, you can also use this...

Vulnerabilities in Car Anti-Theft Device

This is disturbing: …a team of security researchers at UC San Diego, who found that a model of aftermarket car alarm known as the KARR Security System, installed in more than 2 million vehicles across the US by their estimate, can let any hacker within Bluetooth range send radio commands to...

Why AI Needs a “Genie Coefficient”

This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared inIEEE Spectrum. Major benchmarks measure what AI can do. None measure whether it does what you mean: the distance between what you ask an AI to do and the unspoken assumptions about how you want the AI to do it. We propose a ne...

Google Is Suing Chinese Scammers Who Are Using Gemini

Not sure this will have any effect, but I support the effort: According to Google's legal filing, Outsider Enterprise operates through Telegram. The group offers phishing-as-a-service to individuals who may not be technically savvy enough to set up fraudulent websites and text campaigns on their...

AI Use by the US Government

On 14 April, the Trump administration quietly acknowledged the widespread use of AI to automate government processes. The office of management and budget OMB disclosed a staggering 3,611 active or planned use cases for AI across the federal government. The list has ballooned by 70% from the one...

The Intersection of Encryption and AI

As part of their 20th Anniversary celebration, Dark Reading asked five cybersecurity industry leaders who wrote blogs or columns for them over the years to select their favorite piece and share their reflections on the topic today. This is my section. Renowned technologist and author Bruce Schnei...

Identifying People Using Wi-Fi Routers

Not identifying people based on their use of Wi-Fi routers, but identifying people using Wi-Fi signals. This is accomplished through what is known as WiFi sensing, or the use of WiFi signals to infer information about a physical environment. When radio signals like WiFi travel through a space, th...