Friday Squid Blogging: Pet Squid Simulation

From Hackaday.com, this is a neural network simulation of a pet squid. Autonomous Behavior: The squid moves autonomously, making decisions based on his current state hunger, sleepiness, etc.. Implements a vision cone for food detection, simulating realistic foraging behavior. Neural network can...

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...

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...

New Linux Rootkit

Interesting: The company has released a working rootkit called "Curing" that uses iouring, a feature built into the Linux kernel, to stealthily perform malicious activities without being caught by many of the detection solutions currently on the market. At the heart of the issue is the heavy...

Web 3.0 Requires Data Integrity

If you've ever taken a computer security class, you've probably learned about the three legs of computer security--confidentiality, integrity, and availability--known as the CIA triad. When we talk about a system being secure, that's what we're referring to. All are important, but to different...

The Signal Chat Leak and the NSA

US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who started the now-infamous group chat coordinating a US attack against the Yemen-based Houthis on March 15, is seemingly now suggesting that the secure messaging service Signal has security vulnerabilities. "I didn't see this loser in the group," Waltz...

Report on Paragon Spyware

Citizen Lab has a new report on Paragon's spyware: Key Findings: Introducing Paragon Solutions. Paragon Solutions was founded in Israel in 2019 and sells spyware called Graphite. The company differentiates itself by claiming it has safeguards to prevent the kinds of spyware abuses that NSO Group...

Friday Squid Blogging: A New Explanation of Squid Camouflage

New research: An associate professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Northeastern University, Deravi’s recently published paper in the Journal of Materials Chemistry C sheds new light on how squid use organs that essentially function as organic solar cells to help power their camouflage...

Improvements in Brute Force Attacks

New paper: "GPU Assisted Brute Force Cryptanalysis of GPRS, GSM, RFID, and TETRA: Brute Force Cryptanalysis of KASUMI, SPECK, and TEA3." Abstract: Key lengths in symmetric cryptography are determined with respect to the brute force attacks with current technology. While nowadays at least 128-bit...

Friday Squid Blogging: SQUID Band

A bagpipe and drum band: SQUID transforms traditional Bagpipe and Drum Band entertainment into a multi-sensory rush of excitement, featuring high energy bagpipes, pop music influences and visually stunning percussion! As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories i...

Screenshot-Reading Malware

Kaspersky is reporting on a new type of smartphone malware. The malware in question uses optical character recognition OCR to review a device's photo library, seeking screenshots of recovery phrases for crypto wallets. Based on their assessment, infected Google Play apps have been downloaded more...

Friday Squid Blogging: On Squid Brains

Interesting. Blog moderation policy...

Privacy of Photos.app’s Enhanced Visual Search

Initial speculation about a new Apple feature...

Casino Players Using Hidden Cameras for Cheating

The basic strategy is to place a device with a hidden camera in a position to capture normally hidden card values, which are interpreted by an accomplice off-site and fed back to the player via a hidden microphone. Miniaturization is making these devices harder to detect. Presumably AI will soon...

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...

Hacking Digital License Plates

Not everything needs to be digital and "smart." License plates, for example: Josep Rodriguez, a researcher at security firm IOActive, has revealed a technique to “jailbreak” digital license plates sold by Reviver, the leading vendor of those plates in the US with 65,000 plates already sold. By...

Race Condition Attacks against LLMs

These are two attacks against the system components surrounding LLMs: We propose that LLM Flowbreaking, following jailbreaking and prompt injection, joins as the third on the growing list of LLM attack types. Flowbreaking is less about whether prompt or response guardrails can be bypassed, and mo...

Security Analysis of the MERGE Voting Protocol

Interesting analysis: An Internet Voting System Fatally Flawed in Creative New Ways. Abstract: The recently published "MERGE" protocol is designed to be used in the prototype CAC-vote system. The voting kiosk and protocol transmit votes over the internet and then transmit voter-verifiable paper...

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...

China Possibly Hacking US “Lawful Access” Backdoor

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Chinese hackers Salt Typhoon penetrated the networks of US broadband providers, and might have accessed the backdoors that the federal government uses to execute court-authorized wiretap requests. Those backdoors have been mandated by law--CALEA--since...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Game Season Two Teaser

The teaser for Squid Game Season Two dropped. Blog moderation policy...

Remotely Exploding Pagers

Wow. It seems they all exploded simultaneously, which means they were triggered. Were they each tampered with physically, or did someone figure out how to trigger a thermal runaway remotely? Supply chain attack? Malicious code update, or natural vulnerability? I have no idea, but I expect we will...

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...

Hacking Scientific Citations

Some scholars are inflating their reference counts by sneaking them into metadata: Citations of scientific work abide by a standardized referencing system: Each reference explicitly mentions at least the title, authors names, publication year, journal or conference name, and page numbers of the...

Friday Squid Blogging: 1994 Lair of Squid Game

I didnt know: In 1994, Hewlett-Packard released a miracle machine: the HP 200LX pocket-size PC. In the depths of the device, among the MS-DOS productivity apps built into its fixed memory, there lurked a first-person maze game called Lair of Squid. … In Lair of Squid, youre trapped in an underwat...

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...

Using AI for Political Polling

Public polling is a critical function of modern political campaigns and movements, but it isnt what it once was. Recent US election cycles have produced copious postmortems explaining both the successes and the flaws of public polling. There are two main reasons polling fails. First, nonresponse...

Exploiting Mistyped URLs

Interesting research: "Hyperlink Hijacking: Exploiting Erroneous URL Links to Phantom Domains": Abstract: Web users often follow hyperlinks hastily, expecting them to be correctly programmed. However, it is possible those links contain typos or other mistakes. By discovering active but erroneous...

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...

IBM Sells Cybersecurity Group

IBM is selling its QRadar product suite to Palo Alto Networks, for an undisclosed--but probably surprisingly small--sum. I have a personal connection to this. In 2016, IBM bought Resilient Systems, the startup I was a part of. It became part if IBMs cybersecurity offerings, mostly and weirdly...

Friday Squid Blogging: Searching for the Colossal Squid

A cruise ship is searching for the colossal 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...

Using AI-Generated Legislative Amendments as a Delaying Technique

Canadian legislators proposed 19,600 amendments--almost certainly AI-generated--to a bill in an attempt to delay its adoption. I wrote about many different legislative delaying tactics in A Hackers Mind, but this is a new one...

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...

Lessons from a Ransomware Attack against the British Library

You might think that libraries are kind of boring, but this self-analysis of a 2023 ransomware and extortion attack against the British Library is anything but...

Friday Squid Blogging: Operation Squid

Operation Squid found 1.3 tons of cocaine hidden in frozen fish. 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 Insecurity of Video Doorbells

Consumer Reports has analyzed a bunch of popular Internet-connected video doorbells. Their security is terrible. First, these doorbells expose your home IP address and WiFi network name to the internet without encryption, potentially opening your home network to online criminals. … Anyone who can...

New Image/Video Prompt Injection Attacks

Simon Willison has been playing with the video processing capabilities of the new Gemini Pro 1.5 model from Google, and its really impressive. Which means a lot of scary new video prompt injection attacks. And remember, given the current state of technology, prompt injection attacks are impossibl...

On Software Liabilities

Over on Lawfare, Jim Dempsey published a really interesting proposal for software liability: "Standard for Software Liability: Focus on the Product for Liability, Focus on the Process for Safe Harbor." Section 1 of this paper sets the stage by briefly describing the problem to be solved. Section ...

Teaching LLMs to Be Deceptive

Interesting research: "Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training": Abstract: Humans are capable of strategically deceptive behavior: behaving helpfully in most situations, but then behaving very differently in order to pursue alternative objectives when given th...

Friday Squid Blogging: Illex Squid in Argentina Waters

Argentina is reporting that there is a good population of illex squid in its waters ready for fishing, and is working to ensure that Chinese fishing boats dont take it all. 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 bl...

Code Written with AI Assistants Is Less Secure

Interesting research: "Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants?": Abstract: We conduct the first large-scale user study examining how users interact with an AI Code assistant to solve a variety of security related tasks across different programming languages. Overall, we find that...

Voice Cloning with Very Short Samples

New research demonstrates voice cloning, in multiple languages, using samples ranging from one to twelve seconds. Research paper...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at the International PolCampaigns Expo IPE24 in Cape Town, South Africa, January 25-26, 2024. The list is maintained on this page...

Friday Squid Blogging—18th Anniversary Post: New Species of Pygmy Squid Discovered

Theyre Ryukyuan pygmy squid Idiosepius kijimuna and Hannans pygmy squid Kodama jujutsu. The second one represents an entire new genus. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. And, yes, this is the eighteenth anniversary of...

Facial Recognition Systems in the US

A helpful summary of which US retail stores are using facial recognition, thinking about using it, or currently not planning on using it. This, of course, can all change without notice. Three years ago, I wrote that campaigns to ban facial recognition are too narrow. The problem here is...

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...

FTC’s Voice Cloning Challenge

The Federal Trade Commission is running a competition "to foster breakthrough ideas on preventing, monitoring, and evaluating malicious voice cloning."...

Coin Flips Are Biased

Experimental result: Many people have flipped coins but few have stopped to ponder the statistical and physical intricacies of the process. In a preregistered study we collected 350,757 coin flips to test the counterintuitive prediction from a physics model of human coin tossing developed by Pers...

Detecting “Violations of Social Norms” in Text with AI

Researchers are trying to use AI to detect "social norms violations." Feels a little sketchy right now, but this is the sort of thing that AIs will get better at. Like all of these systems, anything but a very low false positive rate makes the detection useless in practice. News article...

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,...