Election Security

I joined a letter supporting the Secure Elections Act S. 2261: The Secure Elections Act strikes a careful balance between state and federal action to secure American voting systems. The measure authorizes appropriation of grants to the states to take important and time-sensitive actions, includin...

Medieval Security Techniques

Sonja Drummer describes with photographs two medieval security techniques. The first is a for authentication: a document has been cut in half with an irregular pattern, so that the two halves can be brought together to prove authenticity. The second is for integrity: hashed lines written above an...

Amazon Has Trucks Filled with Hard Drives and an Armed Guard

From an interview with an Amazon Web Services security engineer: So when you use AWS, part of what youre paying for is security. Right; its part of what we sell. Lets say a prospective customer comes to AWS. They say, "I like pay-as-you-go pricing. Tell me more about that." We say, "Okay, heres h...

Why Are Cryptographers Being Denied Entry into the US?

In March, Adi Shamir -- that's the "S" in RSA -- was denied a US visa to attend the RSA Conference. He's Israeli. This month, British citizen Ross Anderson couldn't attend an awards ceremony in DC because of visa issues. You can listen to his recorded acceptance speech. I've heard of two other...

China Spying on Undersea Internet Cables

Supply chain security is an insurmountably hard problem. The recent focus is on Chinese 5G equipment, but the problem is much broader. This opinion piece looks at undersea communications cables: But now the Chinese conglomerate Huawei Technologies, the leading firm working to deliver 5G telephony...

Why Internet Security Is So Bad

I recently read two different essays that make the point that while Internet security is terrible, it really doesn't affect people enough to make it an issue. This is true, and is something I worry will change in a world of physically capable computers. Automation, autonomy, and physical agency...

Back Issues of the NSA's Cryptolog

Five years ago, the NSA published 23 years of its internal magazine, Cryptolog. There were lots of redactions, of course. What's new is a nice user interface for the issues, noting highlights and levels of redaction...

Banks Attacked through Malicious Hardware Connected to the Local Network

Kaspersky is reporting on a series of bank hacks -- called DarkVishnya -- perpetrated through malicious hardware being surreptitiously installed into the target network: In 2017-2018, Kaspersky Lab specialists were invited to research a series of cybertheft incidents. Each attack had a common...

Mailing Tech Support a Bomb

I understand his frustration, but this is extreme: When police asked Cryptopay what could have motivated Salonen to send the company a pipe bomb ­ or, rather, two pipe bombs, which is what investigators found when they picked apart the explosive package ­ the only thing the company could think of...

Conspiracy Theories around the "Presidential Alert"

Noted conspiracy theorist John McAfee tweeted: The "Presidential alerts": they are capable of accessing the E911 chip in your phones -- giving them full access to your location, microphone, camera and every function of your phone. This not a rant, this is from me, still one of the leading...

Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid Caught Off the Coast of Ireland

It's the second in two months. Video. 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...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: Im speaking via Internet at SHIFT Business Festival in Finland, August 25-26, 2021. I’ll be speaking at an Informa event on September 14, 2021. Details to come. I’m keynoting CIISec Live—an all-online event—September 15-16, 2021. I...

Side-Channel Attack against Electronic Locks

Several high-security electronic locks are vulnerable to side-channel attacks involving power monitoring...

German SG-41 Encryption Machine Up for Auction

A German auction house is selling an SG-41. It looks beautiful. Starting price is 75,000 euros. My guess is that it will sell for around 100K euros...

WhatsApp Vulnerability Fixed

WhatsApp fixed a devastating vulnerability that allowed someone to remotely hack a phone by initiating a WhatsApp voice call. The recipient didn't even have to answer the call. The Israeli cyber-arms manufacturer NSO Group is believed to be behind the exploit, but of course there is no definitive...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid-Focused Menus in Croatia

This is almost over: From 1 December 2018 -- 6 January 2019, Days of Adriatic squid will take place at restaurants all over north-west Istria. Restaurants will be offering affordable full-course menus based on Adriatic squid, combined with quality local olive oil and fine wines. As usual, you can...

NSA Collects MS Windows Error Information

Back in 2013, Der Spiegel reported that the NSA intercepts and collects Windows bug reports: One example of the sheer creativity with which the TAO spies approach their work can be seen in a hacking method they use that exploits the error-proneness of Microsoft's Windows. Every user of the...

Friday Squid Blogging: 80-Foot Steel Kraken Deliberately Sunk

The headline gives the story: "An 80-Foot Steel Kraken Will Create an Artificial Coral Reef Near the British Virgin Islands." 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...

Details of the Cloud Hopper Attacks

Reuters has a long article on the Chinese government APT attack called Cloud Hopper. It was much bigger than originally reported. The hacking campaign, known as "Cloud Hopper," was the subject of a U.S. indictment in December that accused two Chinese nationals of identity theft and fraud...

Alex Stamos on Content Moderation and Security

Really interesting talk by former Facebook CISO Alex Stamos about the problems inherent in content moderation by social media platforms. Well worth watching...

iOS 12.1 Vulnerability

This is really just to point out that computer security is really hard: Almost as soon as Apple released iOS 12.1 on Tuesday, a Spanish security researcher discovered a bug that exploits group Facetime calls to give anyone access to an iPhone users' contact information with no need for a passcode...

Professional Athletes and Wearables

I haven't thought about the privacy issues surrounding professional athletes and wearables. Wearables present serious privacy issues for "Average Joe" consumers, who are entrusting tech companies to safely store and protect their biometric data. Imagine the stakes for a professional athlete, whos...

Friday Squid Blogging: 13-foot Giant Squid Caught off New Zealand Coast

It's probably a juvenile: Researchers aboard the New Zealand-based National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research Ltd NIWA research vessel Tangaroa were on an expedition to survey hoki, New Zealand's most valuable commercial fish, in the Chatham Rise ­ an area of ocean floor to the east of...

Friday Squid Blogging: More on the Giant Squid's DNA

Following on from last week's post, here's more information on sequencing the DNA of the giant 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...

Credit Card Privacy

Good article in the Washington Post on all the surveillance associated with credit card use...

Massive iPhone Hack Targets Uyghurs

China is being blamed for a massive surveillance operation that targeted Uyghur Muslims. This story broke in waves, the first wave being about the iPhone. Earlier this year, Google's Project Zero found a series of websites that have been using zero-day vulnerabilities to indiscriminately install...

Reverse Engineering a Chinese Surveillance App

Human Rights Watch has reverse engineered an app used by the Chinese police to conduct mass surveillance on Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang. The details are fascinating, and chilling. Boing Boing post...

Another NSA Leaker Identified and Charged

In 2015, the Intercept started publishing "The Drone Papers," based on classified documents leaked by an unknown whistleblower. Today, someone who worked at the NSA, and then at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, was charged with the crime. It is unclear how he was initially identified...

Unhackable Cryptography?

A recent article overhyped the release of EverCrypt, a cryptography library created using formal methods to prove security against specific attacks. The Quanta magazine article sets off a series of "snake-oil" alarm bells. The author's Github README is more measured and accurate, and illustrates...

New Attack Against Electrum Bitcoin Wallets

This is clever: How the attack works: Attacker added tens of malicious servers to the Electrum wallet network. Users of legitimate Electrum wallets initiate a Bitcoin transaction. If the transaction reaches one of the malicious servers, these servers reply with an error message that urges users t...

Facebook and Cambridge Analytica

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, news articles and commentators have focused on what Facebook knows about us. A lot, it turns out. It collects data from our posts, our likes, our photos, things we type and delete without posting, and things we do while not on Facebook and even when...

Technology to Out Sex Workers

Two related stories: PornHub is using machine learning algorithms to identify actors in different videos, so as to better index them. People are worried that it can really identify them, by linking their stage names to their real names. Facebook somehow managed to link a sex worker's clients unde...

Hacking a Segway

The Segway has a mobile app. It is hackable: While analyzing the communication between the app and the Segway scooter itself, Kilbride noticed that a user PIN number meant to protect the Bluetooth communication from unauthorized access wasn't being used for authentication at every level of the...

Technology and Policymakers

Technologists and policymakers largely inhabit two separate worlds. It's an old problem, one that the British scientist CP Snow identified in a 1959 essay entitled The Two Cultures. He called them sciences and humanities, and pointed to the split as a major hindrance to solving the world's...

New Reductor Nation-State Malware Compromises TLS

Kaspersky has a detailed blog post about a new piece of sophisticated malware that it's calling Reductor. The malware is able to compromise TLS traffic by infecting the computer with hacked TLS engine substituted on the fly, "marking" infected TLS handshakes by compromising the underlining...

France Outlines Its Approach to Cyberwar

In a document published earlier this month in French, France described the legal framework in which it will conduct cyberwar operations. Lukasz Olejnik explains what it means, and it's worth reading...

More on Law Enforcement Backdoor Demands

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy convened an Encryption Working Group to attempt progress on the "going dark" debate. They have released their report: "Moving the Encryption Policy Conversation Forward. The main...

Wanted: Cybersecurity Imagery

Eli Sugarman of the Hewlettt Foundation laments about the sorry state of cybersecurity imagery: The state of cybersecurity imagery is, in a word, abysmal. A simple Google Image search for the term proves the point: It's all white men in hoodies hovering menacingly over keyboards, green...

Hackers Expose Russian FSB Cyberattack Projects

More nation-state activity in cyberspace, this time from Russia: Per the different reports in Russian media, the files indicate that SyTech had worked since 2009 on a multitude of projects since 2009 for FSB unit 71330 and for fellow contractor Quantum. Projects include: Nautilus -- a project for...

Resetting Your GE Smart Light Bulb

If you need to reset the software in your GE smart light bulb -- firmware version 2.8 or later -- just follow these easy instructions: Start with your bulb off for at least 5 seconds. 1. Turn on for 8 seconds 2. Turn off for 2 seconds 3. Turn on for 8 seconds 4. Turn off for 2 seconds 5. Turn on...

Facebook's New Privacy Hires

The Wired headline sums it up nicely -- "Facebook Hires Up Three of Its Biggest Privacy Critics": In December, Facebook hired Nathan White away from the digital rights nonprofit Access Now, and put him in the role of privacy policy manager. On Tuesday of this week, lawyers Nate Cardozo, of the...

Security Risks of Government Hacking

Some of us -- myself included -- have proposed lawful government hacking as an alternative to backdoors. A new report from the Center of Internet and Society looks at the security risks of allowing government hacking. They include: Disincentive for vulnerability disclosure Cultivation of a market...

Science Fiction Writers Helping Imagine Future Threats

The French army is going to put together a team of science fiction writers to help imagine future threats. Leaving aside the question of whether science fiction writers are better or worse at envisioning nonfictional futures, this isn't new. The US Department of Homeland Security did the same thi...

The Cost of Cybercrime

Really interesting paper calculating the worldwide cost of cybercrime: Abstract: In 2012 we presented the first systematic study of the costs of cybercrime. In this paper,we report what has changed in the seven years since. The period has seen major platform evolution, with the mobile phone...

Reconstructing SIGSALY

Lessons learned in reconstructing the World War II-era SIGSALY voice encryption system...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Sculptures

Pretty. 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...

TSB Bank Disaster

This seems like an absolute disaster: The very short version is that a UK bank, TSB, which had been merged into and then many years later was spun out of Lloyds Bank, was bought by the Spanish bank Banco Sabadell in 2015. Lloyds had continued to run the TSB systems and was to transfer them over t...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Product Recall

Lidl is recalling two of its packaged squid products because of the presence of struvite salt crystals. The danger is unclear. The article says that struvite crystals "may be mistaken as glass fragments," which isn't actually dangerous. It also says: "As these salt crystals may cause injury, the...

Zero-Day Exploit Against Windows BitLocker

It's nasty, but it requires physical access to the computer: The exploit, named YellowKey, was published earlier this week by a researcher who goes by the alias Nightmare-Eclipse. It reliably bypasses default Windows 11 deployments of BitLocker, the full-volume encryption protection Microsoft...

Browser Tracking Using Favicons

Interesting research on persistent web tracking using favicons. For those who dont know, favicons are those tiny icons that appear in browser tabs next to the page name. Abstract: The privacy threats of online tracking have garnered considerable attention in recent years from researchers and...