Apple’s Bug Bounty Program

Apple is now offering a $2M bounty for a zero-click exploit. According to the Apple website: Today we’re announcing the next major chapter for Apple Security Bounty, featuring the industry’s highest rewards, expanded research categories, and a flag system for researchers to objectively demonstrat...

Friday Squid Blogging: Sperm Whale Eating a Giant Squid

Video. 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...

Baggage Tag Scam

I just heard about this: There's a travel scam warning going around the internet right now: You should keep your baggage tags on your bags until you get home, then shred them, because scammers are using luggage tags to file fraudulent claims for missing baggage with the airline. First, the scam i...

AI Agents Need Data Integrity

Think of the Web as a digital territory with its own social contract. In 2014, Tim Berners-Lee called for a "Magna Carta for the Web" to restore the balance of power between individuals and institutions. This mirrors the original charter's purpose: ensuring that those who occupy a territory have ...

SIGINT During World War II

The NSA and GCHQ have jointly published a history of World War II SIGINT: "Secret Messengers: Disseminating SIGINT in the Second World War." This is the story of the British SLUs Special Liaison Units and the American SSOs Special Security Officers...

Friday Squid Blogging: New Vulnerability in Squid HTTP Proxy Server

In a rare squid/security combined post, a new vulnerability was discovered in the Squid HTTP proxy server...

Hacking Trains

Seems like an old system system that predates any care about security: The flaw has to do with the protocol used in a train system known as the End-of-Train and Head-of-Train. A Flashing Rear End Device FRED, also known as an End-of-Train EOT device, is attached to the back of a train and sends...

Where AI Provides Value

If you've worried that AI might take your job, deprive you of your livelihood, or maybe even replace your role in society, it probably feels good to see the latest AI tools fail spectacularly. If AI recommends glue as a pizza topping, then you're safe for another day. But the fact remains that AI...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I'm speaking at the International Conference on Digital Trust, AI and the Future in Edinburgh, Scotland on Tuesday, June 24 at 4:00 PM. The list is maintained on this page...

Friday Squid Blogging: Stubby Squid

Video of the stubby squid Rossia pacifica from offshore Vancouver Island. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered...

Airlines Secretly Selling Passenger Data to the Government

This is news: A data broker owned by the country's major airlines, including Delta, American Airlines, and United, collected U.S. travellers' domestic flight records, sold access to them to Customs and Border Protection CBP, and then as part of the contract told CBP to not reveal where the data...

Communications Backdoor in Chinese Power Inverters

This is a weird story: U.S. energy officials are reassessing the risk posed by Chinese-made devices that play a critical role in renewable energy infrastructure after unexplained communication equipment was found inside some of them, two people familiar with the matter said. … Over the past nine...

NCSC Guidance on “Advanced Cryptography”

The UK's National Cyber Security Centre just released its white paper on "Advanced Cryptography," which it defines as "cryptographic techniques for processing encrypted data, providing enhanced functionality over and above that provided by traditional cryptography." It includes things like...

Applying Security Engineering to Prompt Injection Security

This seems like an important advance in LLM security against prompt injection: Google DeepMind has unveiled CaMeL CApabilities for MachinE Learning, a new approach to stopping prompt-injection attacks that abandons the failed strategy of having AI models police themselves. Instead, CaMeL treats...

How to Leak to a Journalist

Neiman Lab has some good advice on how to leak a story to a journalist...

Cell Phone OPSEC for Border Crossings

I have heard stories of more aggressive interrogation of electronic devices at US border crossings. I know a lot about securing computers, but very little about securing phones. Are there easy ways to delete data--files, photos, etc.--on phones so it can't be recovered? Does resetting a phone to...

AIs as Trusted Third Parties

This is a truly fascinating paper: "Trusted Machine Learning Models Unlock Private Inference for Problems Currently Infeasible with Cryptography." The basic idea is that AIs can act as trusted third parties: Abstract: We often interact with untrusted parties. Prioritization of privacy can limit t...

AIs and Robots Should Sound Robotic

Most people know that robots no longer sound like tinny trash cans. They sound like Siri, Alexa, and Gemini. They sound like the voices in labyrinthine customer support phone trees. And even those robot voices are being made obsolete by new AI-generated voices that can mimic every vocal nuance an...

Friday Squid Blogging: Beaked Whales Feed on Squid

A Travers' beaked whale Mesoplodon traversii washed ashore in New Zealand, and scientists conlcuded that "the prevalence of squid remains in its stomachs suggests that these deep-sea cephalopods form a significant part of the whale's diet, similar to other beaked whale species." Blog moderation...

Mailbox Insecurity

It turns out that all cluster mailboxes in the Denver area have the same master key. So if someone robs a postal carrier, they can open any mailbox. I get that a single master key makes the whole system easier, but it's very fragile security...

Ultralytics Supply-Chain Attack

Last week, we saw a supply-chain attack against the Ultralytics AI library on GitHub. A quick summary: On December 4, a malicious version 8.3.41 of the popular AI library ultralytics ­--which has almost 60 million downloads--was published to the Python Package Index PyPI package repository. The...

Steve Bellovin’s Retirement Talk

Steve Bellovin is retiring. Here's his retirement talk, reflecting on his career and what the cybersecurity field needs next...

Roger Grimes on Prioritizing Cybersecurity Advice

This is a good point: Part of the problem is that we are constantly handed lists…list of required controls…list of things we are being asked to fix or improve…lists of new projects…lists of threats, and so on, that are not ranked for risks. For example, we are often given a cybersecurity guidelin...

Deebot Robot Vacuums Are Using Photos and Audio to Train Their AI

An Australian news agency is reporting that robot vacuum cleaners from the Chinese company Deebot are surreptitiously taking photos and recording audio, and sending that data back to the vendor to train their AIs. Ecovacs's privacy policy--available elsewhere in the app--allows for blanket...

Matthew Green on Telegram’s Encryption

Matthew Green wrote a really good blog post on what Telegrams encryption is and is not. EDITED TO ADD 8/28: Another good explainer from Kaspersky...

US Federal Court Rules Against Geofence Warrants

This is a big deal. A US Appeals Court ruled that geofence warrants--these are general warrants demanding information about all people within a geographical boundary--are unconstitutional. The decision seems obvious to me, but you cant take anything for granted...

Texas Sues GM for Collecting Driving Data without Consent

Texas is suing General Motors for collecting driver data without consent and then selling it to insurance companies: From CNN: In car models from 2015 and later, the Detroit-based car manufacturer allegedly used technology to "collect, record, analyze, and transmit highly detailed driving data...

Model Extraction from Neural Networks

A new paper, "Polynomial Time Cryptanalytic Extraction of Neural Network Models," by Adi Shamir and others, uses ideas from differential cryptanalysis to extract the weights inside a neural network using specific queries and their results. This is much more theoretical than practical, but its a...

Breaking the M-209

Interesting paper about a German cryptanalysis machine that helped break the US M-209 mechanical ciphering machine. The paper contains a good description of how the M-209 works...

Recovering Public Keys from Signatures

Interesting summary of various ways to derive the public key from digitally signed files. Normally, with a signature scheme, you have the public key and want to know whether a given signature is valid. But what if we instead have a message and a signature, assume the signature is valid, and want ...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: Im appearing on a panel on Society and Democracy at ACM Collective Intelligence in Boston, Massachusetts. The conference runs from June 26 through 29, 2024, and my panel is at 9:00 AM on Friday, June 28. Im speaking on "Reimagining...

Seeing Like a Data Structure

Technology was once simply a tool--and a small one at that--used to amplify human intent and capacity. That was the story of the industrial revolution: we could control nature and build large, complex human societies, and the more we employed and mastered technology, the better things got. We don...

Supply Chain Attack against Courtroom Software

No word on how this backdoor was installed: A software maker serving more than 10,000 courtrooms throughout the world hosted an application update containing a hidden backdoor that maintained persistent communication with a malicious website, researchers reported Thursday, in the latest episode o...

On the Zero-Day Market

New paper: "Zero Progress on Zero Days: How the Last Ten Years Created the Modern Spyware Market": Abstract: Spyware makes surveillance simple. The last ten years have seen a global market emerge for ready-made software that lets governments surveil their citizens and foreign adversaries alike an...

Friday Squid Blogging: The Awfulness of Squid Fishing Boats

Its a pretty awful story. 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...

Friday Squid Blogging: SqUID Bots

Theyre AI warehouse robots. 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...

Maybe the Phone System Surveillance Vulnerabilities Will Be Fixed

It seems that the FCC might be fixing the vulnerabilities in SS7 and the Diameter protocol: On March 27 the commission asked telecommunications providers to weigh in and detail what they are doing to prevent SS7 and Diameter vulnerabilities from being misused to track consumers locations. The FCC...

Security Vulnerability in Saflok’s RFID-Based Keycard Locks

Its pretty devastating: Today, Ian Carroll, Lennert Wouters, and a team of other security researchers are revealing a hotel keycard hacking technique they call Unsaflok. The technique is a collection of security vulnerabilities that would allow a hacker to almost instantly open several models of...

EU Court of Human Rights Rejects Encryption Backdoors

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that breaking end-to-end encryption by adding backdoors violates human rights: Seemingly most critically, the Russian government told the ECHR that any intrusion on private lives resulting from decrypting messages was "necessary" to combat terrorism in...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at the Munich Security Conference MSC 2024 in Munich, Germany, on Friday, February 16, 2024. I’m giving a keynote on “AI and Trust” at Generative AI, Free Speech, & Public Discourse. The symposium will be held at...

On Passkey Usability

Matt Burgess tries to only use passkeys. The results are mixed...

Friday Squid Blogging: A Penguin Named “Squid”

Amusing story about a penguin named "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...

Chatbots and Human Conversation

For most of history, communicating with a computer has not been like communicating with a person. In their earliest years, computers required carefully constructed instructions, delivered through punch cards; then came a command-line interface, followed by menus and options and text boxes. If you...

Facial Scanning by Burger King in Brazil

In 2000, I wrote: "If McDonalds offered three free Big Macs for a DNA sample, there would be lines around the block." Burger King in Brazil is almost there, offering discounts in exchange for a facial scan. From a marketing video: "At the end of the year, its Friday every day, and the hangover...

Friday Squid Blogging: Unpatched Vulnerabilities in the Squid Caching Proxy

In a rare squid/security post, heres an article about unpatched vulnerabilities in the Squid caching proxy. 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 York Increases Cybersecurity Rules for Financial Companies

Another example of a large and influential state doing things the federal government wont: Boards of directors, or other senior committees, are charged with overseeing cybersecurity risk management, and must retain an appropriate level of expertise to understand cyber issues, the rules say...

Microsoft is Soft-Launching Security Copilot

Microsoft has announced an early access program for its LLM-based security chatbot assistant: Security Copilot. I am curious whether this thing is actually useful...

Political Disinformation and AI

Elections around the world are facing an evolving threat from foreign actors, one that involves artificial intelligence. Countries trying to influence each others elections entered a new era in 2016, when the Russians launched a series of social media disinformation campaigns targeting the US...

Friday Squid Blogging: New Squid Species

An ancient squid: New research on fossils has revealed that a vampire-like ancient squid haunted Earths oceans 165 million years ago. The study, published in June edition of the journal Papers in Palaeontology, says the creature had a bullet-shaped body with luminous organs, eight arms and sucker...

On the Cybersecurity Jobs Shortage

In April, Cybersecurity Ventures reported on extreme cybersecurity job shortage: Global cybersecurity job vacancies grew by 350 percent, from one million openings in 2013 to 3.5 million in 2021, according to Cybersecurity Ventures. The number of unfilled jobs leveled off in 2022, and remains at 3...