Cheating at Conkers

The men's world conkers champion is accused of cheating with a steel chestnut...

More Details on Israel Sabotaging Hezbollah Pagers and Walkie-Talkies

The Washington Post has a long and detailed story about the operation that's well worth reading alternate version here. The sales pitch came from a marketing official trusted by Hezbollah with links to Apollo. The marketing official, a woman whose identity and nationality officials declined to...

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...

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...

Espionage with a Drone

The US is using a World War II law that bans aircraft photography of military installations to charge someone with doing the same thing with a drone...

Friday Squid Blogging: Dana Squid Attacking Camera

Fantastic footage of a Dana squid attacking a camera at a depth of about a kilometer. 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...

Unredacting Pixelated Text

Experiments in unredacting text that has been pixelated...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Purses

Squid-shaped purses for sale. 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...

In Memoriam: Ross Anderson, 1956–2024

Last week, I posted a short memorial of Ross Anderson. The Communications of the ACM asked me to expand it. Heres the longer version. EDITED TO ADD 4/11: Two weeks before he passed away, Ross gave an 80-minute interview where he told his life story...

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...

Apple Announces Post-Quantum Encryption Algorithms for iMessage

Apple announced PQ3, its post-quantum encryption standard based on the Kyber secure key-encapsulation protocol, one of the post-quantum algorithms selected by NIST in 2022. Theres a lot of detail in the Apple blog post, and more in Douglas Stabilas security analysis. I am of two minds about this...

AIs Hacking Websites

New research: LLM Agents can Autonomously Hack Websites Abstract: In recent years, large language models LLMs have become increasingly capable and can now interact with tools i.e., call functions, read documents, and recursively call themselves. As a result, these LLMs can now function autonomous...

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...

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...

Canadian Citizen Gets Phone Back from Police

After 175 million failed password guesses, a judge rules that the Canadian police must return a suspects phone. Judge Carter said the investigation can continue without the phones, and he noted that Ottawa police have made a formal request to obtain more data from Google. "This strikes me as a...

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...

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...

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...

Police Get Medical Records without a Warrant

More unconstrained surveillance: Lawmakers noted the pharmacies policies for releasing medical records in a letter dated Tuesday to the Department of Health and Human Services HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra. The letter--signed by Sen. Ron Wyden D-Ore., Rep. Pramila Jayapal D-Wash., and Rep. Sara...

Security Analysis of a Thirteenth-Century Venetian Election Protocol

Interesting analysis: This paper discusses the protocol used for electing the Doge of Venice between 1268 and the end of the Republic in 1797. We will show that it has some useful properties that in addition to being interesting in themselves, also suggest that its fundamental design principle is...

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...

Tracking Down a Suspect through Cell Phone Records

Interesting forensics in connection with a serial killer arrest: Investigators went through phone records collected from both midtown Manhattan and the Massapequa Park area of Long Island--two areas connected to a "burner phone" they had tied to the killings. In court, prosecutors later said the...

The US Is Spying on the UN Secretary General

The Washington Post is reporting that the US is spying on the UN Secretary General. The reports on Guterres appear to contain the secretary generals personal conversations with aides regarding diplomatic encounters. They indicate that the United States relied on spying powers granted under the...

Typing Incriminating Evidence in the Memo Field

Dont do it: Recently, the manager of the Harvard Med School morgue was accused of stealing and selling human body parts. Cedric Lodge and his wife Denise were among a half-dozen people arrested for some pretty grotesque crimes. This part is also at least a little bit funny though: Over a three-ye...

On the Need for an AI Public Option

Artificial intelligence will bring great benefits to all of humanity. But do we really want to entrust this revolutionary technology solely to a small group of US tech companies? Silicon Valley has produced no small number of moral disappointments. Google retired its "dont be evil" pledge before...

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...

Indiana, Iowa, and Tennessee Pass Comprehensive Privacy Laws

Its been a big month for US data privacy. Indiana, Iowa, and Tennessee all passed state privacy laws, bringing the total number of states with a privacy law up to eight. No private right of action in any of those, which means its up to the states to enforce the laws...

Micro-Star International Signing Key Stolen

Micro-Star International--aka MSI--had its UEFI signing key stolen last month. This raises the possibility that the leaked key could push out updates that would infect a computers most nether regions without triggering a warning. To make matters worse, Matrosov said, MSI doesnt have an automated...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Food Poisoning

University of Connecticut basketball player Jordan Hawkins claims to have suffered food poisoning from calamari the night before his NCAA finals game. The restaurant disagrees: On Sunday, a Mastros employee politely cast doubt on the idea that the restaurant might have caused the illness, citing...

Russian Cyberwarfare Documents Leaked

Now this is interesting: Thousands of pages of secret documents reveal how Vulkans engineers have worked for Russian military and intelligence agencies to support hacking operations, train operatives before attacks on national infrastructure, spread disinformation and control sections of the...

The Security Vulnerabilities of Message Interoperability

Jenny Blessing and Ross Anderson have evaluated the security of systems designed to allow the various Internet messaging platforms to interoperate with each other: The Digital Markets Act ruled that users on different platforms should be able to exchange messages with each other. This opens up a...

A Hacker’s Mind News

My latest book continues to sell well. Its ranking hovers between 1,500 and 2,000 on Amazon. Its been spied in airports. Reviews are consistently good. I have been enjoying giving podcast interviews. It all feels pretty good right now. You can order a signed book from me here. For those of you in...

ChatGPT Privacy Flaw

OpenAI has disabled ChatGPTs privacy history, almost certainly because they had a security flaw where users were seeing each others histories...

Friday Squid Blogging: We’re Almost at Flying Squid Drones

Researchers are prototyping multi-segment shapeshifter drones, which are "the precursors to flying squid-bots." 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...

Putting Undetectable Backdoors in Machine Learning Models

This is really interesting research from a few months ago: Abstract: Given the computational cost and technical expertise required to train machine learning models, users may delegate the task of learning to a service provider. Delegation of learning has clear benefits, and at the same time raise...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at Mobile World Congress 2023 in Barcelona, Spain, on March 1, 2023 at 1:00 PM CET. I’m speaking on “How to Reclaim Power in the Digital World” at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, on Thursday, March 16, 2023, at 5:30 PM...

Passwords Are Terrible (Surprising No One)

This is the result of a security audit: More than a fifth of the passwords protecting network accounts at the US Department of the Interior--including Password1234, Password1234!, and ChangeItN0w!--were weak enough to be cracked using standard methods, a recently published security audit of the...

Publisher’s Weekly Review of A Hacker’s Mind

Publishers Weekly reviewed A Hackers Mind--and its a starred review! "Hacking is something that the rich and powerful do, something that reinforces existing power structures," contends security technologist Schneier Click Here to Kill Everybody in this excellent survey of exploitation. Taking a...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Fetish

Seems that about 1.5% of people have a squid fetish. 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...

The Decoupling Principle

This is a really interesting paper that discusses what the authors call the Decoupling Principle: The idea is simple, yet previously not clearly articulated: to ensure privacy, information should be divided architecturally and institutionally such that each entity has only the information they ne...

The US Has a Shortage of Bomb-Sniffing Dogs

Nothing beats a dogs nose for detecting explosives. Unfortunately, there arent enough dogs: Last month, the US Government Accountability Office GAO released a nearly 100-page report about working dogs and the need for federal agencies to better safeguard their health and wellness. The GOA says th...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Brains

Researchers have new evidence of how squid brains develop: Researchers from the FAS Center for Systems Biology describe how they used a new live-imaging technique to watch neurons being created in the embryo in almost real-time. They were then able to track those cells through the development of...

A Digital Red Cross

The International Committee of the Red Cross wants some digital equivalent to the iconic red cross, to alert would-be hackers that they are accessing a medical network. The emblem wouldn’t provide technical cybersecurity protection to hospitals, Red Cross infrastructure or other medical providers...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Purse

Perfect for an evening out. 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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Chinese Squid Fishing

China claims that it is "engaging in responsible squid fishing": Chen Xinjun, dean of the College of Marine Sciences at Shanghai Ocean University, made the remarks in response to recent accusations by foreign reporters and actor Leonardo DiCaprio that China is depleting its own fish stock and tha...

Adversarial ML Attack that Secretly Gives a Language Model a Point of View

Machine learning security is extraordinarily difficult because the attacks are so varied--and it seems that each new one is weirder than the next. Heres the latest: a training-time attack that forces the model to exhibit a point of view: Spinning Language Models: Risks of Propaganda-As-A-Service...

Digital License Plates

California just legalized digital license plates, which seems like a solution without a problem. The Rplate can reportedly function in extreme temperatures, has some customization features, and is managed via Bluetooth using a smartphone app. Rplates are also equipped with an LTE antenna, which c...