CISA Security Leak

Crazy story: Until this past weekend, a contractor for the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency CISA maintained a public GitHub repository that exposed credentials to several highly privileged AWS GovCloud accounts and a large number of internal CISA systems. Security experts said the...

macOS Kernel Memory Corruption Exploit

A group used Anthropic's Mythos AI model to help find a kernel memory corruption vulnerability and exploit on Apple's M5. News article...

Laurie Anderson Is Quoting Me

Not by name, but Laurie Anderson quotes me in one of the tracks of her new album: My favorite quote is from a cryptologist who said "If you think technology will solve your problems, you don't understand technology and you don't understand your problems." Also in interviews: "Of course, it's...

Smart Glasses for the Authorities

ICE is developing its own version of smart glasses, with facial recognition tied to various databases...

ICE Uses Graphite Spyware

ICE has admitted that it uses spyware from the Israeli company Graphite...

AI Chatbots and Trust

All the leading AI chatbots are sycophantic, and that's a problem: Participants rated sycophantic AI responses as more trustworthy than balanced ones. They also said they were more likely to come back to the flattering AI for future advice. And critically ­ they couldn't tell the difference betwe...

Why Tehran’s Two-Tiered Internet Is So Dangerous

Iran is slowly emerging from the most severe communications blackout in its history and one of the longest in the world. Triggered as part of January's government crackdown against citizen protests nationwide, the regime implemented an internet shutdown that transcends the standard definition of...

I Am in the Epstein Files

Once. Someone named "Vincenzo lozzo" wrote to Epstein in email, in 2016: "I wouldn't pay too much attention to this, Schneier has a long tradition of dramatizing and misunderstanding things." The topic of the email is DDoS attacks, and it is unclear what I am dramatizing and misunderstanding. Rab...

Microsoft Is Finally Killing RC4

After twenty-six years, Microsoft is finally upgrading the last remaining instance of the encryption algorithm RC4 in Windows. of the most visible holdouts in supporting RC4 has been Microsoft. Eventually, Microsoft upgraded Active Directory to support the much more secure AES encryption standard...

IACR Nullifies Election Because of Lost Decryption Key

The International Association of Cryptologic Research--the academic cryptography association that's been putting conferences like Crypto back when "crypto" meant "cryptography" and Eurocrypt since the 1980s--had to nullify an online election when trustee Moti Yung lost his decryption key. For thi...

Friday Squid Blogging: Jigging for Squid

A nice story...

US Disrupts Massive Cell Phone Array in New York

This is a weird story: The US Secret Service disrupted a network of telecommunications devices that could have shut down cellular systems as leaders gather for the United Nations General Assembly in New York City. The agency said on Tuesday that last month it found more than 300 SIM servers and...

My Latest Book: Rewiring Democracy

I am pleased to announce the imminent publication of my latest book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI will Transform our Politics, Government, and Citizenship: coauthored with Nathan Sanders, and published by MIT Press on October 21. Rewiring Democracy looks beyond common tropes like deepfakes to exami...

1965 Cryptanalysis Training Workbook Released by the NSA

In the early 1960s, National Security Agency cryptanalyst and cryptanalysis instructor Lambros D. Callimahos coined the term "Stethoscope" to describe a diagnostic computer program used to unravel the internal structure of pre-computer ciphertexts. The term appears in the newly declassified...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid-Shaped UFO Spotted Over Texas

Here's the story. The commenters on X formerly Twitter are unimpressed. 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...

How the Solid Protocol Restores Digital Agency

The current state of digital identity is a mess. Your personal information is scattered across hundreds of locations: social media companies, IoT companies, government agencies, websites you have accounts on, and data brokers you've never heard of. These entities collect, store, and trade your...

Tradecraft in the Information Age

Long article on the difficulty impossibility? of human spying in the age of ubiquitous digital surveillance...

Chinese-Owned VPNs

One one my biggest worries about VPNs is the amount of trust users need to place in them, and how opaque most of them are about who owns them and what sorts of data they retain. A new study found that many commercials VPNS are often surreptitiously owned by Chinese companies. It would be hard for...

DoorDash Hack

A DoorDash driver stole over $2.5 million over several months: The driver, Sayee Chaitainya Reddy Devagiri, placed expensive orders from a fraudulent customer account in the DoorDash app. Then, using DoorDash employee credentials, he manually assigned the orders to driver accounts he and the othe...

AI-Generated Law

On April 14, Dubai's ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, announced that the United Arab Emirates would begin using artificial intelligence to help write its laws. A new Regulatory Intelligence Office would use the technology to "regularly suggest updates" to the law and "accelerate the...

Fake Student Fraud in Community Colleges

Reporting on the rise of fake students enrolling in community college courses: The bots' goal is to bilk state and federal financial aid money by enrolling in classes, and remaining enrolled in them, long enough for aid disbursements to go out. They often accomplish this by submitting AI-generate...

Arguing Against CALEA

At a Congressional hearing earlier this week, Matt Blaze made the point that CALEA, the 1994 law that forces telecoms to make phone calls wiretappable, is outdated in today's threat environment and should be rethought: In other words, while the legally-mandated CALEA capability requirements have...

On Generative AI Security

Microsoft's AI Red Team just published "Lessons from Red Teaming 100 Generative AI Products." Their blog post lists "three takeaways," but the eight lessons in the report itself are more useful: 1. Understand what the system can do and where it is applied. 2. You don't have to compute gradients t...

Subverting LLM Coders

Really interesting research: "An LLM-Assisted Easy-to-Trigger Backdoor Attack on Code Completion Models: Injecting Disguised Vulnerabilities against Strong Detection": Abstract : Large Language Models LLMs have transformed code completion tasks, providing context-based suggestions to boost...

List of Old NSA Training Videos

The NSAs "National Cryptographic School Television Catalogue" from 1991 lists about 600 COMSEC and SIGINT training videos. There are a bunch explaining the operations of various cryptographic equipment, and a few code words I have never heard of before...

Rethinking Democracy for the Age of AI

There is a lot written about technologys threats to democracy. Polarization. Artificial intelligence. The concentration of wealth and power. I have a more general story: The political and economic systems of governance that were created in the mid-18th century are poorly suited for the 21st...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: Im giving a webinar via Zoom on Wednesday, May 22, at 11:00 AM ET. The topic is "Should the USG Establish a Publicly Funded AI Option?" The list is maintained on this page...

New Attack Against Self-Driving Car AI

This is another attack that convinces the AI to ignore road signs: Due to the way CMOS cameras operate, rapidly changing light from fast flashing diodes can be used to vary the color. For example, the shade of red on a stop sign could look different on each line depending on the time between the...

AI Voice Scam

Scammers tricked a company into believing they were dealing with a BBC presenter. They faked her voice, and accepted money intended for her...

Public AI as an Alternative to Corporate AI

This mini-essay was my contribution to a round table on Power and Governance in the Age of AI. Its nothing I havent said here before, but for anyone who hasnt read my longer essays on the topic, its a shorter introduction. The increasingly centralized control of AI is an ominous sign. When tech...

Drones and the US Air Force

Fascinating analysis of the use of drones on a modern battlefield--that is, Ukraine--and the inability of the US Air Force to react to this change. The F-35A certainly remains an important platform for high-intensity conventional warfare. But the Air Force is planning to buy 1,763 of the aircraft...

Automakers Are Sharing Driver Data with Insurers without Consent

Kasmir Hill has the story: Modern cars are internet-enabled, allowing access to services like navigation, roadside assistance and car apps that drivers can connect to their vehicles to locate them or unlock them remotely. In recent years, automakers, including G.M., Honda, Kia and Hyundai, have...

Google Stops Collecting Location Data from Maps

Google Maps now stores location data locally on your device, meaning that Google no longer has that data to turn over to the police...

A Robot the Size of the World

In 2016, I wrote about an Internet that affected the world in a direct, physical manner. It was connected to your smartphone. It had sensors like cameras and thermostats. It had actuators: Drones, autonomous cars. And it had smarts in the middle, using sensor data to figure out what to do and the...

New SSH Vulnerability

This is interesting: For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that a large portion of cryptographic keys used to protect data in computer-to-server SSH traffic are vulnerable to complete compromise when naturally occurring computational errors occur while the connection is being...

The Future of Drone Warfare

Ukraine is using $400 drones to destroy tanks: Facing an enemy with superior numbers of troops and armor, the Ukrainian defenders are holding on with the help of tiny drones flown by operators like Firsov that, for a few hundred dollars, can deliver an explosive charge capable of destroying a...

Security Vulnerability of Switzerland’s E-Voting System

Online voting is insecure, period. This doesnt stop organizations and governments from using it. And for low-stakes elections, its probably fine. Switzerland--not low stakes--uses online voting for national elections. Andrew Appel explains why its a bad idea: Last year, I published a 5-part serie...

Google Reportedly Disconnecting Employees from the Internet

Supposedly Google is starting a pilot program of disabling Internet connectivity from employee computers: The company will disable internet access on the select desktops, with the exception of internal web-based tools and Google-owned websites like Google Drive and Gmail. Some workers who need th...

AI as Sensemaking for Public Comments

Its become fashionable to think of artificial intelligence as an inherently dehumanizing technology, a ruthless force of automation that has unleashed legions of virtual skilled laborers in faceless form. But what if AI turns out to be the one tool able to identify what makes your ideas special,...

Security and Human Behavior (SHB) 2023

Im just back from the sixteenth Workshop on Security and Human Behavior, hosted by Alessandro Acquisti at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. SHB is a small, annual, invitational workshop of people studying various aspects of the human side of security, organized each year by Alessandro...

Identifying the Idaho Killer

The New York Times has a long article on the investigative techniques used to identify the person who stabbed and killed four University of Idaho students. Pay attention to the techniques: The case has shown the degree to which law enforcement investigators have come to rely on the digital...

Large Language Models and Elections

Earlier this week, the Republican National Committee released a video that it claims was "built entirely with AI imagery." The content of the ad isnt especially novel--a dystopian vision of America under a second term with President Joe Biden--but the deliberate emphasis on the technology used to...

New Zero-Click Exploits against iOS

Citizen Lab has identified three zero-click exploits against iOS 15 and 16. These were used by NSO Groups Pegasus spyware in 2022, and deployed by Mexico against human rights defenders. These vulnerabilities have all been patched. One interesting bit is that Apples Lockdown Mode part of iOS 16...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking on “Cybersecurity Thinking to Reinvent Democracy” at RSA Conference 2023 in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, April 25, 2023, at 9:40 AM PT. I’m speaking at IT-S Now 2023 in Vienna, Austria, on June 2, 2023 at 8:3...

FBI Advising People to Avoid Public Charging Stations

The FBI is warning people against using public phone-charging stations, worrying that the combination power-data port can be used to inject malware onto the devices: Avoid using free charging stations in airports, hotels, or shopping centers. Bad actors have figured out ways to use public USB por...

Car Thieves Hacking the CAN Bus

Car thieves are injecting malicious software into a cars network through wires in the headlights or taillights that fool the car into believing that the electronic key is nearby. News articles...

North Korea Hacking Cryptocurrency Sites with 3CX Exploit

News: Researchers at Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky today revealed that they identified a small number of cryptocurrency-focused firms as at least some of the victims of the 3CX software supply-chain attack thats unfolded over the past week. Kaspersky declined to name any of those victim...

A Device to Turn Traffic Lights Green

Heres a story about a hacker who reprogrammed a device called "Flipper Zero" to mimic Opticom transmitters--to turn traffic lights in his path green. As mentioned earlier, the Flipper Zero has a built-in sub-GHz radio that lets the device receive data or transmit it, with the right firmware in...

A Hacker’s Mind News

A Hackers Mind will be published on Tuesday. I have done a written interview and a podcast interview about the book. Its been chosen as a "February 2023 Must-Read Book" by the Next Big Idea Club. And an "Editors Pick"--whatever that means--on Amazon. There have been three reviews so far. I am...

Kevin Mitnick Hacked California Law in 1983

Early in his career, Kevin Mitnick successfully hacked California law. He told me the story when he heard about my new book, which he partially recounts his 2012 book, Ghost in the Wires. The setup is that he just discovered that theres warrant for his arrest by the California Youth Authority, an...