Inventors of Quantum Cryptography Win Turing Award

Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard have won the 2026 Turing Award for inventing quantum cryptography. I am incredibly pleased to see them get this recognition. I have always thought the technology to be fantastic, even though I think it's largely unnecessary. I wrote up my thoughts back in 2008,...

Side-Channel Attacks Against LLMs

Here are three papers describing different side-channel attacks against LLMs. "Remote Timing Attacks on Efficient Language Model Inference": Abstract: Scaling up language models has significantly increased their capabilities. But larger models are slower models, and so there is now an extensive...

Microsoft is Giving the FBI BitLocker Keys

Microsoft gives the FBI the ability to decrypt BitLocker in response to court orders: about twenty times per year. It's possible for users to store those keys on a device they own, but Microsoft also recommends BitLocker users store their keys on its servers for convenience. While that means...

Ireland Proposes Giving Police New Digital Surveillance Powers

This is coming: The Irish government is planning to bolster its police's ability to intercept communications, including encrypted messages, and provide a legal basis for spyware use...

AI-Powered Surveillance in Schools

It all sounds pretty dystopian: Inside a white stucco building in Southern California, video cameras compare faces of passersby against a facial recognition database. Behavioral analysis AI reviews the footage for signs of violent behavior. Behind a bathroom door, a smoke detector-shaped device...

Hacking Wheelchairs over Bluetooth

Researchers have demonstrated remotely controlling a wheelchair over Bluetooth. CISA has issued an advisory. CISA said the WHILL wheelchairs did not enforce authentication for Bluetooth connections, allowing an attacker who is in Bluetooth range of the targeted device to pair with it. The attacke...

A Cyberattack Was Part of the US Assault on Venezuela

We don't have many details: President Donald Trump suggested Saturday that the U.S. used cyberattacks or other technical capabilities to cut power off in Caracas during strikes on the Venezuelan capital that led to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. If true, it would mark one of...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Found in Light Fixture

Probably a college prank. 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...

Someone Boarded a Plane at Heathrow Without a Ticket or Passport

I'm sure there's a story here: Sources say the man had tailgated his way through to security screening and passed security, meaning he was not detected carrying any banned items. The man deceived the BA check-in agent by posing as a family member who had their passports and boarding passes...

Like Social Media, AI Requires Difficult Choices

In his 2020 book, "Future Politics , " British barrister Jamie Susskind wrote that the dominant question of the 20th century was "How much of our collective life should be determined by the state, and what should be left to the market and civil society?" But in the early decades of this century,...

Friday Squid Blogging: Flying Neon Squid Found on Israeli Beach

A meter-long flying neon squid Ommastrephes bartramii was found dead on an Israeli beach. The species is rare in the Mediterranean. 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...

Huawei and Chinese Surveillance

This quote is from House of Huawei: The Secret History of China 's Most Powerful Company. "Long before anyone had heard of Ren Zhengfei or Huawei, Wan Runnan had been China's star entrepreneur in the 1980s, with his company, the Stone Group, touted as "China's IBM." Wan had believed that economic...

More Prompt||GTFO

The next three in this series on online events highlighting interesting uses of AI in cybersecurity are online: 4, 5, and 6. Well worth watching...

Book Review: The Business of Secrets

The Business of Secrets: Adventures in Selling Encryption Around the World by Fred Kinch May 24, 2024 From the vantage point of today, it's surreal reading about the commercial cryptography business in the 1970s. Nobody knew anything. The manufacturers didn't know whether the cryptography they so...

Faking Receipts with AI

Over the past few decades, it's become easier and easier to create fake receipts. Decades ago, it required special paper and printers--I remember a company in the UK advertising its services to people trying to cover up their affairs. Then, receipts became computerized, and faking them required...

Scientists Need a Positive Vision for AI

For many in the research community, it's gotten harder to be optimistic about the impacts of artificial intelligence. As authoritarianism is rising around the world, AI-generated "slop" is overwhelming legitimate media, while AI-generated deepfakes are spreading misinformation and parroting...

Social Engineering People’s Credit Card Details

Good Wall Street Journal article on criminal gangs that scam people out of their credit card information: Your highway toll payment is now past due, one text warns. You have U.S. Postal Service fees to pay, another threatens. You owe the New York City Department of Finance for unpaid traffic...

The Trump Administration’s Increased Use of Social Media Surveillance

This chilling paragraph is in a comprehensive Brookings report about the use of tech to deport people from the US: The administration has also adapted its methods of social media surveillance. Though agencies like the State Department have gathered millions of handles and monitored political...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Overfishing in the Southwest Atlantic

Article. Report...

Daniel Miessler on the AI Attack/Defense Balance

His conclusion: Context wins Basically whoever can see the most about the target, and can hold that picture in their mind the best, will be best at finding the vulnerabilities the fastest and taking advantage of them. Or, as the defender, applying patches or mitigations the fastest. And if you’re...

Use of Generative AI in Scams

New report: "Scam GPT: GenAI and the Automation of Fraud." This primer maps what we currently know about generative AI’s role in scams, the communities most at risk, and the broader economic and cultural shifts that are making people more willing to take risks, more vulnerable to deception, and...

Abusing Notion’s AI Agent for Data Theft

Notion just released version 3.0, complete with AI agents. Because the system contains Simon Willson's lethal trifecta, it's vulnerable to data theft though prompt injection. First, the trifecta: The lethal trifecta of capabilities is: Access to your private data --one of the most common purposes...

Apple’s New Memory Integrity Enforcement

Apple has introduced a new hardware/software security feature in the iPhone 17: "Memory Integrity Enforcement," targeting the memory safety vulnerabilities that spyware products like Pegasus tend to use to get unauthorized system access. From Wired: In recent years, a movement has been steadily...

Microsoft Still Uses RC4

Senator Ron Wyden has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Microsoft over its continued use of the RC4 encryption algorithm. The letter talks about a hacker technique called Kerberoasting, that exploits the Kerberos authentication system...

AI in Government

Just a few months after Elon Musk's retreat from his unofficial role leading the Department of Government Efficiency DOGE, we have a clearer picture of his vision of government powered by artificial intelligence, and it has a lot more to do with consolidating power than benefitting the public. Ev...

Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks Against LLM Assistants

Really good research on practical attacks against LLM agents. "Invitation Is All You Need! Promptware Attacks Against LLM-Powered Assistants in Production Are Practical and Dangerous" Abstract: The growing integration of LLMs into applications has introduced new security risks, notably known as...

LLM Coding Integrity Breach

Here's an interesting story about a failure being introduced by LLM-written code. Specifically, the LLM was doing some code refactoring, and when it moved a chunk of code from one file to another it changed a "break" to a "continue." That turned an error logging statement into an infinite loop,...

Friday Squid Blogging: A Case of Squid Fossil Misidentification

What scientists thought were squid fossils were actually arrow worms...

Cheating on Quantum Computing Benchmarks

Peter Gutmann and Stephan Neuhaus have a new paper--I think it's new, even though it has a March 2025 date--that makes the argument that we shouldn't trust any of the quantum factorization benchmarks, because everyone has been cooking the books: Similarly, quantum factorisation is performed using...

Subliminal Learning in AIs

Today's freaky LLM behavior: We study subliminal learning, a surprising phenomenon where language models learn traits from model-generated data that is semantically unrelated to those traits. For example, a "student" model learns to prefer owls when trained on sequences of numbers generated by a...

“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: How Squid Skin Distorts Light

New research. 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...

Self-Driving Car Video Footage

Two articles crossed my path recently. First, a discussion of all the video Waymo has from outside its cars: in this case related to the LA protests. Second, a discussion of all the video Tesla has from inside its cars. Lots of things are collecting lots of video of lots of other things. How and...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Werewolf Hacking Group

In another rare squid/cybersecurity intersection, APT37 is also known as "Squid Werewolf." As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Loyalty Cards

Squid is a loyalty card platform in Ireland. Blog moderation policy...

Device Code Phishing

This isn't new, but it's increasingly popular: The technique is known as device code phishing. It exploits "device code flow," a form of authentication formalized in the industry-wide OAuth standard. Authentication through device code flow is designed for logging printers, smart TVs, and similar...

Friday Squid Blogging: The Colossal Squid

Long article on the colossal squid. Blog moderation policy...

ExxonMobil Lobbyist Caught Hacking Climate Activists

The Department of Justice is investigating a lobbying firm representing ExxonMobil for hacking the phones of climate activists: The hacking was allegedly commissioned by a Washington, D.C., lobbying firm, according to a lawyer representing the U.S. government. The firm, in turn, was allegedly...

Third Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy (IWORD 2024)

Last month, Henry Farrell and I convened the Third Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy IWORD 2024 at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg Center in Washington DC. This is a small, invitational workshop on the future of democracy. As with the previous two workshops, the goal was to...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Opioid Alternatives from Squid Research

Is there nothing that squid research can't solve? "If you're working with an organism like squid that can edit genetic information way better than any other organism, then it makes sense that that might be useful for a therapeutic application like deadening pain," he said. … Researchers hope to...

FBI Deletes PlugX Malware from Thousands of Computers

According to a DOJ press release, the FBI was able to delete the Chinese-used PlugX malware from "approximately 4,258 U.S.-based computers and networks." Details: To retrieve information from and send commands to the hacked machines, the malware connects to a command-and-control server that is...

Salt Typhoon’s Reach Continues to Grow

The US government has identified a ninth telecom that was successfully hacked by Salt Typhoon...

Scams Based on Fake Google Emails

Scammers are hacking Google Forms to send email to victims that come from google.com. Brian Krebs reports on the effects. Boing Boing post...

Friday Squid Blogging: Biology and Ecology of the Colossal Squid

Good survey paper. Blog moderation policy...

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...

Why Italy Sells So Much Spyware

Interesting analysis: Although much attention is given to sophisticated, zero-click spyware developed by companies like Israel’s NSO Group, the Italian spyware marketplace has been able to operate relatively under the radar by specializing in cheaper tools. According to an Italian Ministry of...