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...

How Criminals Are Using Generative AI

Theres a new report on how criminals are using generative AI tools: Key Takeaways: Adoption rates of AI technologies among criminals lag behind the rates of their industry counterparts because of the evolving nature of cybercrime. Compared to last year, criminals seem to have abandoned any attemp...

New Attack on VPNs

This attack has been feasible for over two decades: Researchers have devised an attack against nearly all virtual private network applications that forces them to send and receive some or all traffic outside of the encrypted tunnel designed to protect it from snooping or tampering. TunnelVision, ...

New Lawsuit Attempting to Make Adversarial Interoperability Legal

Lots of complicated details here: too many for me to summarize well. It involves an obscure Section 230 provision--and an even more obscure typo. Read this...

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...

My TED Talks

I have spoken at several TED conferences over the years. TEDxPSU 2010: "Reconceptualizing Security" TEDxCambridge 2013: "The Battle for Power on the Internet" TEDMed 2016: "Who Controls Your Medical Data?" Im putting this here because I want all three links in one place...

Rare Interviews with Enigma Cryptanalyst Marian Rejewski

The Polish Embassy has posted a series of short interview segments with Marian Rejewski, the first person to crack the Enigma. Details from his biography...

The UK Bans Default Passwords

The UK is the first country to ban default passwords on IoT devices. On Monday, the United Kingdom became the first country in the world to ban default guessable usernames and passwords from these IoT devices. Unique passwords installed by default are still permitted. The Product Security and...

AI Voice Scam

Scammers tricked a company into believing they were dealing with a BBC presenter. They faked her voice, and accepted money intended for her...

WhatsApp in India

Meta has threatened to pull WhatsApp out of India if the courts try to force it to break its end-to-end encryption...

Whale Song Code

During the Cold War, the US Navy tried to make a secret code out of whale song. The basic plan was to develop coded messages from recordings of whales, dolphins, sea lions, and seals. The submarine would broadcast the noises and a computer--the Combo Signal Recognizer CSR--would detect the specif...

Friday Squid Blogging: Searching for the Colossal Squid

A cruise ship is searching for the 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...

Long Article on GM Spying on Its Cars’ Drivers

Kashmir Hill has a really good article on how GM tricked its drivers into letting it spy on them--and then sold that data to insurance companies...

The Rise of Large-Language-Model Optimization

The web has become so interwoven with everyday life that it is easy to forget what an extraordinary accomplishment and treasure it is. In just a few decades, much of human knowledge has been collectively written up and made available to anyone with an internet connection. But all of this is comin...

Dan Solove on Privacy Regulation

Law professor Dan Solove has a new article on privacy regulation. In his email to me, he writes: "I’ve been pondering privacy consent for more than a decade, and I think I finally made a breakthrough with this article." His mini-abstract: In this Article I argue that most of the time, privacy...

Microsoft and Security Incentives

Former senior White House cyber policy director A. J. Grotto talks about the economic incentives for companies to improve their security--in particular, Microsoft: Grotto told us Microsoft had to be "dragged kicking and screaming" to provide logging capabilities to the government by default, and...

Using Legitimate GitHub URLs for Malware

Interesting social-engineering attack vector: McAfee released a report on a new LUA malware loader distributed through what appeared to be a legitimate Microsoft GitHub repository for the "C++ Library Manager for Windows, Linux, and MacOS," known as vcpkg. The attacker is exploiting a property of...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Trackers

A new bioadhesive makes it easier to attach trackers to squid. Note: the article does not discuss squid privacy rights. 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...

Other Attempts to Take Over Open Source Projects

After the XZ Utils discovery, people have been examining other open-source projects. Surprising no one, the incident is not unique: The OpenJS Foundation Cross Project Council received a suspicious series of emails with similar messages, bearing different names and overlapping GitHub-associated...

Using AI-Generated Legislative Amendments as a Delaying Technique

Canadian legislators proposed 19,600 amendments--almost certainly AI-generated--to a bill in an attempt to delay its adoption. I wrote about many different legislative delaying tactics in A Hackers Mind, but this is a new one...

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...

New Lattice Cryptanalytic Technique

A new paper presents a polynomial-time quantum algorithm for solving certain hard lattice problems. This could be a big deal for post-quantum cryptographic algorithms, since many of them base their security on hard lattice problems. A few things to note. One, this paper has not yet been peer...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: Im speaking twice at RSA Conference 2024 in San Francisco. Ill be on a panel on software liability on May 6, 2024 at 8:30 AM, and Im giving a keynote on AI and democracy on May 7, 2024 at 2:25 PM. The list is maintained on this pag...

Friday Squid Blogging: The Awfulness of Squid Fishing Boats

Its a pretty awful story. 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...

Smuggling Gold by Disguising it as Machine Parts

Someone got caught trying to smuggle 322 pounds of gold thats about a quarter of a cubic foot out of Hong Kong. It was disguised as machine parts: On March 27, customs officials x-rayed two air compressors and discovered that they contained gold that had been "concealed in the integral parts" of...

Backdoor in XZ Utils That Almost Happened

Last week, the Internet dodged a major nation-state attack that would have had catastrophic cybersecurity repercussions worldwide. It’s a catastrophe that didn’t happen, so it won’t get much attention--but it should. There’s an important moral to the story of the attack and its discovery: The...

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...

US Cyber Safety Review Board on the 2023 Microsoft Exchange Hack

The US Cyber Safety Review Board released a report on the summer 2023 hack of Microsoft Exchange by China. It was a serious attack by the Chinese government that accessed the emails of senior US government officials. From the executive summary: The Board finds that this intrusion was preventable...

Security Vulnerability of HTML Emails

This is a newly discovered email vulnerability: The email your manager received and forwarded to you was something completely innocent, such as a potential customer asking a few questions. All that email was supposed to achieve was being forwarded to you. However, the moment the email appeared in...

Friday Squid Blogging: SqUID Bots

Theyre AI warehouse robots. 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...

Maybe the Phone System Surveillance Vulnerabilities Will Be Fixed

It seems that the FCC might be fixing the vulnerabilities in SS7 and the Diameter protocol: On March 27 the commission asked telecommunications providers to weigh in and detail what they are doing to prevent SS7 and Diameter vulnerabilities from being misused to track consumers locations. The FCC...

Surveillance by the New Microsoft Outlook App

The ProtonMail people are accusing Microsofts new Outlook for Windows app of conducting extensive surveillance on its users. It shares data with advertisers, a lot of data: The window informs users that Microsoft and those 801 third parties use their data for a number of purposes, including to:...

Class-Action Lawsuit against Google’s Incognito Mode

The lawsuit has been settled: Google has agreed to delete "billions of data records" the company collected while users browsed the web using Incognito mode, according to documents filed in federal court in San Francisco on Monday. The agreement, part of a settlement in a class action lawsuit file...

XZ Utils Backdoor

The cybersecurity world got really lucky last week. An intentionally placed backdoor in XZ Utils, an open-source compression utility, was pretty much accidentally discovered by a Microsoft engineer--weeks before it would have been incorporated into both Debian and Red Hat Linux. From ArsTehnica:...

Declassified NSA Newsletters

Through a 2010 FOIA request yes, it took that long, we have copies of the NSAs KRYPTOS Society Newsletter, "Tales of the Krypt," from 1994 to 2003. There are many interesting things in the 800 pages of newsletter. There are many redactions. And a 1994 review of Applied Cryptography by redacted:...

Magic Security Dust

Adam Shostack is selling magic security dust. Its about time someone is commercializing this essential technology...

Ross Anderson

Ross Anderson unexpectedly passed away Thursday night in, I believe, his home in Cambridge. I cant remember when I first met Ross. Of course it was before 2008, when we created the Security and Human Behavior workshop. It was well before 2001, when we created the Workshop on Economics and...

Friday Squid Blogging: The Geopolitics of Eating Squid

New York Times op-ed on the Chinese dominance of the squid industry: Chinas domination in seafood has raised deep concerns among American fishermen, policymakers and human rights activists. They warn that China is expanding its maritime reach in ways that are putting domestic fishermen around the...

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...

Hardware Vulnerability in Apple’s M-Series Chips

Its yet another hardware side-channel attack: The threat resides in the chips’ data memory-dependent prefetcher, a hardware optimization that predicts the memory addresses of data that running code is likely to access in the near future. By loading the contents into the CPU cache before it’s...

Security Vulnerability in Saflok’s RFID-Based Keycard Locks

Its pretty devastating: Today, Ian Carroll, Lennert Wouters, and a team of other security researchers are revealing a hotel keycard hacking technique they call Unsaflok. The technique is a collection of security vulnerabilities that would allow a hacker to almost instantly open several models of...

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...

AI and Trust

Watch the Video on YouTube.com A 15-minute talk by Bruce Schneier...

Licensing AI Engineers

The debate over professionalizing software engineers is decades old. The basic idea is that, like lawyers and architects, there should be some professional licensing requirement for software engineers. Heres a law journal article recommending the same idea for AI engineers. This Article proposes...

Friday Squid Blogging: New Species of Squid Discovered

A new species of squid was discovered, along with about a hundred other species. 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...

Google Pays $10M in Bug Bounties in 2023

BleepingComputer has the details. Its $2M less than in 2022, but its still a lot. The highest reward for a vulnerability report in 2023 was $113,337, while the total tally since the programs launch in 2010 has reached $59 million. For Android, the worlds most popular and widely used mobile...

Public AI as an Alternative to Corporate AI

This mini-essay was my contribution to a round table on Power and Governance in the Age of AI. Its nothing I havent said here before, but for anyone who hasnt read my longer essays on the topic, its a shorter introduction. The increasingly centralized control of AI is an ominous sign. When tech...

Cheating Automatic Toll Booths by Obscuring License Plates

The Wall Street Journal is reporting on a variety of techniques drivers are using to obscure their license plates so that automatic readers cant identify them and charge tolls properly. Some drivers have power-washed paint off their plates or covered them with a range of household items such as...

AI and the Evolution of Social Media

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. A decade ago, social media was celebrated for sparking democratic uprisings in the Arab world and beyond. Now front pages are splashed with stories of social platforms’ role in misinformation, business conspiracy, malfeasance, and risks to mental health. In a 2022...

Drones and the US Air Force

Fascinating analysis of the use of drones on a modern battlefield--that is, Ukraine--and the inability of the US Air Force to react to this change. The F-35A certainly remains an important platform for high-intensity conventional warfare. But the Air Force is planning to buy 1,763 of the aircraft...