Upcoming Book on AI and Democracy

If youve been reading my blog, youve noticed that I have written a lot about AI and democracy, mostly with my co-author Nathan Sanders. I am pleased to announce that were writing a book on the topic. This isnt a book about deep fakes, or misinformation. This is a book about what happens when AI...

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...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: New Squid Species

A new squid species--of the Gonatidae family--was discovered. The video shows her holding a brood of very large eggs. Research paper...

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...

Security Analysis of the EU’s Digital Wallet

A group of cryptographers have analyzed the eiDAS 2.0 regulation electronic identification and trust services that defines the new EU Digital Identity Wallet...

The US Is Banning Kaspersky

This move has been coming for a long time. The Biden administration on Thursday said it’s banning the company from selling its products to new US-based customers starting on July 20, with the company only allowed to provide software updates to existing customers through September 29. The ban--­th...

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...

Paul Nakasone Joins OpenAI’s Board of Directors

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

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Nebula

Beautiful astronomical photo...

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"...

Recovering Public Keys from Signatures

Interesting summary of various ways to derive the public key from digitally signed files. Normally, with a signature scheme, you have the public key and want to know whether a given signature is valid. But what if we instead have a message and a signature, assume the signature is valid, and want ...

New Blog Moderation Policy

There has been a lot of toxicity in the comments section of this blog. Recently, were having to delete more and more comments. Not just spam and off-topic comments, but also sniping and personal attacks. Its gotten so bad that I need to do something. My options are limited because Im just one...

The Hacking of Culture and the Creation of Socio-Technical Debt

Culture is increasingly mediated through algorithms. These algorithms have splintered the organization of culture, a result of states and tech companies vying for influence over mass audiences. One byproduct of this splintering is a shift from imperfect but broad cultural narratives to a...

Rethinking Democracy for the Age of AI

There is a lot written about technologys threats to democracy. Polarization. Artificial intelligence. The concentration of wealth and power. I have a more general story: The political and economic systems of governance that were created in the mid-18th century are poorly suited for the 21st...

Using LLMs to Exploit Vulnerabilities

Interesting research: "Teams of LLM Agents can Exploit Zero-Day Vulnerabilities." Abstract: LLM agents have become increasingly sophisticated, especially in the realm of cybersecurity. Researchers have shown that LLM agents can exploit real-world vulnerabilities when given a description of the...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Cartoon

Squid humor. 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 appearing on a panel on Society and Democracy at ACM Collective Intelligence in Boston, Massachusetts. The conference runs from June 26 through 29, 2024, and my panel is at 9:00 AM on Friday, June 28. Im speaking on "Reimagining...

Demo of AES GCM Misuse Problems

This is really neat demo of the security problems arising from reusing nonces with a symmetric cipher in GCM mode...

AI and the Indian Election

As India concluded the worlds largest election on June 5, 2024, with over 640 million votes counted, observers could assess how the various parties and factions used artificial intelligence technologies--and what lessons that holds for the rest of the world. The campaigns made extensive use of AI...

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...

LLMs Acting Deceptively

New research: "Deception abilities emerged in large language models": Abstract: Large language models LLMs are currently at the forefront of intertwining AI systems with human communication and everyday life. Thus, aligning them with human values is of great importance. However, given the steady...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Catch Quotas in Peru

Peru has set a lower squid quota for 2024. The article says "giant squid," but that seems wrong. We dont eat those. 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...

Security and Human Behavior (SHB) 2024

This week, I hosted the seventeenth Workshop on Security and Human Behavior at the Harvard Kennedy School. This is the first workshop since our co-founder, Ross Anderson, died unexpectedly. SHB is a small, annual, invitational workshop of people studying various aspects of the human side of...

The Justice Department Took Down the 911 S5 Botnet

The US Justice Department has dismantled an enormous botnet: According to an indictment unsealed on May 24, from 2014 through July 2022, Wang and others are alleged to have created and disseminated malware to compromise and amass a network of millions of residential Windows computers worldwide...

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...

Online Privacy and Overfishing

Microsoft recently caught state-backed hackers using its generative AI tools to help with their attacks. In the security community, the immediate questions werent about how hackers were using the tools that was utterly predictable, but about how Microsoft figured it out. The natural conclusion wa...

Breaking a Password Manager

Interesting story of breaking the security of the RoboForm password manager in order to recover a cryptocurrency wallet password. Grand and Bruno spent months reverse engineering the version of the RoboForm program that they thought Michael had used in 2013 and found that the pseudo-random number...

Seeing Like a Data Structure

Technology was once simply a tool--and a small one at that--used to amplify human intent and capacity. That was the story of the industrial revolution: we could control nature and build large, complex human societies, and the more we employed and mastered technology, the better things got. We don...

AI Will Increase the Quantity—and Quality—of Phishing Scams

A piece I coauthored with Fredrik Heiding and Arun Vishwanath in the Harvard Business Review: Summary. Gen AI tools are rapidly making these emails more advanced, harder to spot, and significantly more dangerous. Recent research showed that 60% of participants fell victim to artificial intelligen...

Friday Squid Blogging: Baby Colossal Squid

This video might be a juvenile 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...

How AI Will Change Democracy

I dont think its an exaggeration to predict that artificial intelligence will affect every aspect of our society. Not by doing new things. But mostly by doing things that are already being done by humans, perfectly competently. Replacing humans with AIs isnt necessarily interesting. But when an A...

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...

Privacy Implications of Tracking Wireless Access Points

Brian Krebs reports on research into geolocating routers: Apple and the satellite-based broadband service Starlink each recently took steps to address new research into the potential security and privacy implications of how their services geolocate devices. Researchers from the University of...

Lattice-Based Cryptosystems and Quantum Cryptanalysis

Quantum computers are probably coming, though we dont know when--and when they arrive, they will, most likely, be able to break our standard public-key cryptography algorithms. In anticipation of this possibility, cryptographers have been working on quantum-resistant public-key algorithms. The...

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...

On the Zero-Day Market

New paper: "Zero Progress on Zero Days: How the Last Ten Years Created the Modern Spyware Market": Abstract: Spyware makes surveillance simple. The last ten years have seen a global market emerge for ready-made software that lets governments surveil their citizens and foreign adversaries alike an...

Personal AI Assistants and Privacy

Microsoft is trying to create a personal digital assistant: At a Build conference event on Monday, Microsoft revealed a new AI-powered feature called "Recall" for Copilot+ PCs that will allow Windows 11 users to search and retrieve their past activities on their PC. To make it work, Recall record...

Unredacting Pixelated Text

Experiments in unredacting text that has been pixelated...

Detecting Malicious Trackers

From Slashdot: Apple and Google have launched a new industry standard called "Detecting Unwanted Location Trackers" to combat the misuse of Bluetooth trackers for stalking. Starting Monday, iPhone and Android users will receive alerts when an unknown Bluetooth device is detected moving with them...

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: 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...

FBI Seizes BreachForums Website

The FBI has seized the BreachForums website, used by ransomware criminals to leak stolen corporate data. If law enforcement has gained access to the hacking forums backend data, as they claim, they would have email addresses, IP addresses, and private messages that could expose members and be use...

Zero-Trust DNS

Microsoft is working on a promising-looking protocol to lock down DNS. ZTDNS aims to solve this decades-old problem by integrating the Windows DNS engine with the Windows Filtering Platform--the core component of the Windows Firewall--directly into client devices. Jake Williams, VP of research an...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: Im giving a webinar via Zoom on Wednesday, May 22, at 11:00 AM ET. The topic is "Should the USG Establish a Publicly Funded AI Option?" The list is maintained on this page...

Another Chrome Vulnerability

Google has patched another Chrome zero-day: On Thursday, Google said an anonymous source notified it of the vulnerability. The vulnerability carries a severity rating of 8.8 out of 10. In response, Google said, it would be releasing versions 124.0.6367.201/.202 for macOS and Windows and...

LLMs’ Data-Control Path Insecurity

Back in the 1960s, if you played a 2,600Hz tone into an AT&T pay phone, you could make calls without paying. A phone hacker named John Draper noticed that the plastic whistle that came free in a box of Captain Crunch cereal worked to make the right sound. That became his hacker name, and everyone...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Mating Strategies

Some squids are "consorts," others are "sneakers." The species is healthiest when individuals have different strategies randomly. 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...

New Attack Against Self-Driving Car AI

This is another attack that convinces the AI to ignore road signs: Due to the way CMOS cameras operate, rapidly changing light from fast flashing diodes can be used to vary the color. For example, the shade of red on a stop sign could look different on each line depending on the time between the...