“Encryption Backdoors and the Fourth Amendment”

Law journal article that looks at the DualECPRNG backdoor from a US constitutional perspective: Abstract : The National Security Agency NSA reportedly paid and pressured technology companies to trick their customers into using vulnerable encryption products. This Article examines whether any of...

Friday Squid Blogging: What to Do When You Find a Squid “Egg Mop”

Tips on what to do if you find a mop of squid eggs. 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...

White House Bans WhatsApp

Reuters is reporting that the White House has banned WhatsApp on all employee devices: The notice said the "Office of Cybersecurity has deemed WhatsApp a high risk to users due to the lack of transparency in how it protects user data, absence of stored data encryption, and potential security risk...

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...

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...

Court Rules Against NSO Group

The case is over: A jury has awarded WhatsApp $167 million in punitive damages in a case the company brought against Israel-based NSO Group for exploiting a software vulnerability that hijacked the phones of thousands of users. I'm sure it'll be appealed. Everything always is...

Florida Backdoor Bill Fails

A Florida bill requiring encryption backdoors failed to pass...

DIRNSA Fired

In "Secrets and Lies" 2000, I wrote: It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state. It's something a bunch of us were saying at the time, in reference to the vast NSA's surveillance capabilities. I have been thinking of that quote a lot as I read ne...

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...

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...

China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea Intelligence Sharing

Former CISA Director Jen Easterly writes about a new international intelligence sharing co-op: Historically, China, Russia, Iran & North Korea have cooperated to some extent on military and intelligence matters, but differences in language, culture, politics & technological sophistication have...

“Emergent Misalignment” in LLMs

Interesting research: "Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs": Abstract: We present a surprising result regarding LLMs and alignment. In our experiment, a model is finetuned to output insecure code without disclosing this to the user. The resulting model act...

UK Demanded Apple Add a Backdoor to iCloud

Last month, the UK government demanded that Apple weaken the security of iCloud for users worldwide. On Friday, Apple took steps to comply for users in the United Kingdom. But the British law is written in a way that requires Apple to give its government access to anyone, anywhere in the world. I...

Deepfakes and the 2024 US Election

Interesting analysis: We analyzed every instance of AI use in elections collected by the WIRED AI Elections Project source for our analysis, which tracked known uses of AI for creating political content during elections taking place in 2024 worldwide. In each case, we identified what AI was used...

AI Will Write Complex Laws

Artificial intelligence AI is writing law today. This has required no changes in legislative procedure or the rules of legislative bodies--all it takes is one legislator, or legislative assistant, to use generative AI in the process of drafting a bill. In fact, the use of AI by legislators is onl...

The First Password on the Internet

It was created in 1973 by Peter Kirstein: So from the beginning I put password protection on my gateway. This had been done in such a way that even if UK users telephoned directly into the communications computer provided by Darpa in UCL, they would require a password. In fact this was the first...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Biology and Ecology of the Colossal Squid

Good survey paper. Blog moderation policy...

Jailbreaking LLM-Controlled Robots

Surprising no one, it's easy to trick an LLM-controlled robot into ignoring its safety instructions...

NSO Group Spies on People on Behalf of Governments

The Israeli company NSO Group sells Pegasus spyware to countries around the world including countries like Saudi Arabia, UAE, India, Mexico, Morocco and Rwanda. We assumed that those countries use the spyware themselves. Now we've learned that that's not true: that NSO Group employees operate the...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Sculpture in Massachusetts Building

Great blow-up sculpture. Blog moderation policy. The post Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Sculpture in Massachusetts Building appeared first on Schneier on Security...

Simson Garfinkel on Spooky Cryptographic Action at a Distance

Excellent read. One example: Consider the case of basic public key cryptography, in which a person’s public and private key are created together in a single operation. These two keys are entangled, not with quantum physics, but with math. When I create a virtual machine server in the Amazon cloud...

Auto-Identification Smart Glasses

Two students have created a demo of a smart-glasses app that performs automatic facial recognition and then information lookups. Kind of obvious--something similar was done in 2011--but the sort of creepy demo that gets attention. News article...

Weird Zimbra Vulnerability

Hackers can execute commands on a remote computer by sending malformed emails to a Zimbra mail server. It's critical, but difficult to exploit reliably. In an email sent Wednesday afternoon, Proofpoint researcher Greg Lesnewich seemed to largely concur that the attacks weren't likely to lead to...

NIST Recommends Some Common-Sense Password Rules

NIST's second draft of its "SP 800-63-4"--its digital identify guidelines--finally contains some really good rules about passwords: The following requirements apply to passwords: 1. lVerifiers and CSPs SHALL require passwords to be a minimum of eight characters in length and SHOULD require...

FBI Shuts Down Chinese Botnet

The FBI has shut down a botnet run by Chinese hackers: The botnet malware infected a number of different types of internet-connected devices around the world, including home routers, cameras, digital video recorders, and NAS drives. Those devices were used to help infiltrate sensitive networks...

YubiKey Side-Channel Attack

There is a side-channel attack against YubiKey access tokens that allows someone to clone a device. Its a complicated attack, requiring the victims username and password, and physical access to their YubiKey--as well as some technical expertise and equipment. Still, nice piece of security analysi...

Take a Selfie Using a NY Surveillance Camera

This site will let you take a selfie with a New York City traffic surveillance camera. EDITED TO ADD: BoingBoing post...

NIST Releases First Post-Quantum Encryption Algorithms

From the Federal Register: After three rounds of evaluation and analysis, NIST selected four algorithms it will standardize as a result of the PQC Standardization Process. The public-key encapsulation mechanism selected was CRYSTALS-KYBER, along with three digital signature schemes:...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: Im speaking at eCrime 2024 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. The event runs from September 24 through 26, 2024, and my keynote is on the 24th. The list is maintained on this page...

People-Search Site Removal Services Largely Ineffective

Consumer Reports has a new study of people-search site removal services, concluding that they dont really work: As a whole, people-search removal services are largely ineffective. Private information about each participant on the people-search sites decreased after using the people-search removal...

Education in Secure Software Development

The Linux Foundation and OpenSSF released a report on the state of education in secure software development. …many developers lack the essential knowledge and skills to effectively implement secure software development. Survey findings outlined in the report show nearly one-third of all...

Nearly 7% of Internet Traffic Is Malicious

Cloudflare reports on the state of applications security. It claims that 6.8% of Internet traffic is malicious. And that CVEs are exploited as quickly as 22 minutes after proof-of-concepts are published. News articles...

New Research in Detecting AI-Generated Videos

The latest in what will be a continuing arms race between creating and detecting videos: The new tool the research project is unleashing on deepfakes, called "MISLnet", evolved from years of data derived from detecting fake images and video with tools that spot changes made to digital video or...

Snake Mimics a Spider

This is a fantastic video. Its an Iranian spider-tailed horned viper Pseudocerastes urarachnoides. Its tail looks like a spider, which the snake uses to fool passing birds looking for a meal...

Brett Solomon on Digital Rights

Brett Solomon is retiring from AccessNow after fifteen years as its Executive Director. Hes written a blog post about what hes learned and what comes next...

Public Surveillance of Bars

This article about an app that lets people remotely view bars to see if theyre crowded or not is filled with commentary--on both sides--about privacy and openness...

James Bamford on Section 702 Extension

Longtime NSA-watcher James Bamford has a long article on the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act FISA...

Paul Nakasone Joins OpenAI’s Board of Directors

Former NSA Director Paul Nakasone has joined the board of OpenAI...

Ross Anderson’s Memorial Service

The memorial service for Ross Anderson will be held on Saturday, at 2:00 PM BST. People can attend remotely on Zoom. The passcode is "L3954FrrEF"...

Friday Squid Blogging: Emotional Support Squid

When asked what makes this an "emotional support squid" and not just another stuffed animal, its creator says: Theyre emotional support squid because theyre large, and cuddly, but also cheerfully bright and derpy. They make great neck pillows and you can fidget with the arms and tentacles for...

X.com Automatically Changing Link Text but Not URLs

Brian Krebs reported that X formerly known as Twitter started automatically changing twitter.com links to x.com links. The problem is: 1 it changed any domain name that ended with "twitter.com," and 2 it only changed the links appearance anchortext, not the underlying URL. So if you were a clever...

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...

On Secure Voting Systems

Andrew Appel shepherded a public comment--signed by twenty election cybersecurity experts, including myself--on best practices for ballot marking devices and vote tabulation. It was written for the Pennsylvania legislature, but its general in nature. From the executive summary: We believe that no...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: New Extinct Species of Vampire Squid Discovered

Paleontologists have discovered a 183-million-year-old species of vampire squid. Prior research suggests that the vampyromorph lived in the shallows off an island that once existed in what is now the heart of the European mainland. The research team believes that the remarkable degree of...

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...