5G Security

The security risks inherent in Chinese-made 5G networking equipment are easy to understand. Because the companies that make the equipment are subservient to the Chinese government, they could be forced to include backdoors in the hardware or software to give Beijing remote access. Eavesdropping i...

Artificial Personas and Public Discourse

Presidential campaign season is officially, officially, upon us now, which means it's time to confront the weird and insidious ways in which technology is warping politics. One of the biggest threats on the horizon: artificial personas are coming, and they're poised to take over political debate...

Friday Squid Blogging: Stuffed Squid with Vegetables and Pancetta

A Croatian recipe. 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...

Police Surveillance Tools from Special Services Group

Special Services Group, a company that sells surveillance tools to the FBI, DEA, ICE, and other US government agencies, has had its secret sales brochure published. Motherboard received the brochure as part of a FOIA request to the Irvine Police Department in California. "The Tombstone Cam is our...

New SHA-1 Attack

There's a new, practical, collision attack against SHA-1: In this paper, we report the first practical implementation of this attack, and its impact on real-world security with a PGP/GnuPG impersonation attack. We managed to significantly reduce the complexity of collisions attack against SHA-1: ...

USB Cable Kill Switch for Laptops

BusKill is designed to wipe your laptop Linux only if it is snatched from you in a public place: The idea is to connect the BusKill cable to your Linux laptop on one end, and to your belt, on the other end. When someone yanks your laptop from your lap or table, the USB cable disconnects from the...

Mailbox Master Keys

Here's a physical-world example of why master keys are a bad idea. It's a video of two postal thieves using a master key to open apartment building mailboxes. Changing the master key for physical mailboxes is a logistical nightmare, which is why this problem won't be fixed anytime soon...

Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid Video from the Gulf of Mexico

Fantastic video: Scientists had used a specialized camera system developed by Widder called the Medusa, which uses red light undetectable to deep sea creatures and has allowed scientists to discover species and observe elusive ones. The probe was outfitted with a fake jellyfish that mimicked the...

Chrome Extension Stealing Cryptocurrency Keys and Passwords

A malicious Chrome extension surreptitiously steals Ethereum keys and passwords: According to Denley, the extension is dangerous to users in two ways. First, any funds ETH coins and ERC0-based tokens managed directly inside the extension are at risk. Denley says that the extension sends the priva...

Mysterious Drones Are Flying over Colorado

No one knows who they belong to. Well, of course someone knows. And my guess is that it's likely that we will know soon. EDITED TO ADD 1/3: Another article...

Hacking School Surveillance Systems

Lance Vick suggesting that students hack their schools' surveillance systems. "This is an ethical minefield that I feel students would be well within their rights to challenge, and if needed, undermine," he said. Of course, there are a lot more laws in place against this sort of thing than there...

Friday Squid Blogging: New Species of Bobtail Squid

Euprymna brenneri was discovered in the waters of Okinawa. 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...

Chinese Hackers Bypassing Two-Factor Authentication

Interesting story of how a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group is bypassing the RSA SecurID two-factor authentication system. How they did it remains unclear; although, the Fox-IT team has their theory. They said APT20 stole an RSA SecurID software token from a hacked system, which the Chinese...

ToTok Is an Emirati Spying Tool

The smartphone messaging app ToTok is actually an Emirati spying tool: But the service, ToTok, is actually a spying tool, according to American officials familiar with a classified intelligence assessment and a New York Times investigation into the app and its developers. It is used by the...

Friday Squid Blogging: Streamlined Quick Unfolding Investigation Drone

Yet another squid acronym. 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...

Lousy IoT Security

DTEN makes smart screens and whiteboards for videoconferencing systems. Forescout found that their security is terrible: In total, our researchers discovered five vulnerabilities of four different kinds: Data exposure: PDF files of shared whiteboards e.g. meeting notes and other sensitive files...

Attacker Causes Epileptic Seizure over the Internet

This isn't a first, but I think it will be the first conviction: The GIF set off a highly unusual court battle that is expected to equip those in similar circumstances with a new tool for battling threatening trolls and cyberbullies. On Monday, the man who sent Eichenwald the moving image, John...

Iranian Attacks on Industrial Control Systems

New details: At the CyberwarCon conference in Arlington, Virginia, on Thursday, Microsoft security researcher Ned Moran plans to present new findings from the company's threat intelligence group that show a shift in the activity of the Iranian hacker group APT33, also known by the names Holmium,...

Security Vulnerabilities in the RCS Texting Protocol

Interesting research: SRLabs founder Karsten Nohl, a researcher with a track record of exposing security flaws in telephony systems, argues that RCS is in many ways no better than SS7, the decades-old phone system carriers still used for calling and texting, which has long been known to be...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I'm speaking at SecIT by Heise in Hannover, Germany on March 26, 2020. The list is maintained on this page...

Friday Squid Blogging: Color-Changing Properties of the Opalescent Inshore Squid

Interesting stuff. 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...

EFF on the Mechanics of Corporate Surveillance

EFF has published a comprehensible and very readable "deep dive" into the technologies of corporate surveillance, both on the Internet and off. Well worth reading and sharing. Boing Boing post...

Scaring People into Supporting Backdoors

Back in 1998, Tim May warned us of the "Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse": "terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and money launderers." I tended to cast it slightly differently. This is me from 2005: Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, an...

Extracting Data from Smartphones

Privacy International has published a detailed, technical examination of how data is extracted from smartphones...

Reforming CDA 230

There's a serious debate on reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. I am in the process of figuring out what I believe, and this is more a place to put resources and listen to people's comments. The EFF has written extensively on why it is so important and dismantling it will be...

Failure Modes in Machine Learning

Interesting taxonomy of machine-learning failures pdf that encompasses both mistakes and attacks, or -- in their words -- intentional and unintentional failure modes. It's a good basis for threat modeling...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squidfall Safety

Watchmen supporting material. 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...

Andy Ellis on Risk Assessment

Andy Ellis, the CSO of Akamai, gave a great talk about the psychology of risk at the Business of Software conference this year. I've written about this before. One quote of mine: "The problem is our brains are intuitively suited to the sorts of risk management decisions endemic to living in small...

Election Machine Insecurity Story

Interesting story of a flawed computer voting machine and a paper ballot available for recount. All ended well, but only because of that paper backup. Vote totals in a Northampton County judge's race showed one candidate, Abe Kassis, a Democrat, had just 164 votes out of 55,000 ballots across mor...

Becoming a Tech Policy Activist

Carolyn McCarthy gave an excellent TEDx talk about becoming a tech policy activist. It's a powerful call for public-interest technologists...

RSA-240 Factored

This just in: We are pleased to announce the factorization of RSA-240, from RSA's challenge list, and the computation of a discrete logarithm of the same size 795 bits: RSA-240 = 12462036678171878406583504460810659043482037465167880575481878888328...

The Story of Tiversa

The New Yorker has published the long and interesting story of the cybersecurity firm Tiversa. Watching "60 Minutes," Boback saw a remarkable new business angle. Here was a multibillion-dollar industry with a near-existential problem and no clear solution. He did not know it then, but, as he turn...

Cameras that Automatically Detect Mobile Phone Use

New South Wales is implementing a camera system that automatically detects when a driver is using a mobile phone...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid-Like Underwater Drone

The Sea Hunting Autonomous Reconnaissance Drone SHARD swims like a squid and can explode on command. 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...

Manipulating Machine Learning Systems by Manipulating Training Data

Interesting research: "TrojDRL: Trojan Attacks on Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents": Abstract:: Recent work has identified that classification models implemented as neural networks are vulnerable to data-poisoning and Trojan attacks at training time. In this work, we show that these training-ti...

DHS Mandates Federal Agencies to Run Vulnerability Disclosure Policy

The DHS is requiring all federal agencies to develop a vulnerability disclosure policy. The goal is that people who discover vulnerabilities in government systems have a mechanism for reporting them to someone who might actually do something about it. The devil is in the details, of course, but...

Friday Squid Blogging: T-Shirt

"Squid Pro Quo" T-shirt. 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...

The NSA Warns of TLS Inspection

The NSA has released a security advisory warning of the dangers of TLS inspection: Transport Layer Security Inspection TLSI, also known as TLS break and inspect, is a security process that allows enterprises to decrypt traffic, inspect the decrypted content for threats, and then re-encrypt the...

GPS Manipulation

Long article on the manipulation of GPS in Shanghai. It seems not to be some Chinese military program, but ships who are stealing sand. The Shanghai "crop circles," which somehow spoof each vessel to a different false location, are something new. "I'm still puzzled by this," says Humphreys. "I...

Iran Has Shut Off its Internet

Iran has gone pretty much entirely offline in the wake of nationwide protests. This is the best article detailing what's going on; this is also good. AccessNow has a global campaign to stop Internet shutdowns. TITLE EDITED TO REDUCE CONFUSION...

Security Vulnerabilities in Android Firmware

Researchers have discovered and revealed 146 vulnerabilities in various incarnations of Android smartphone firmware. The vulnerabilities were found by scanning the phones of 29 different Android makers, and each is unique to a particular phone or maker. They were found using automatic tools, and ...

Friday Squid Blogging: Planctotuethis Squid

Neat video, and an impressive-looking squid. I can't figure out how long it is. 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...

TPM-Fail Attacks Against Cryptographic Coprocessors

Really interesting research: TPM-FAIL: TPM meets Timing and Lattice Attacks, by Daniel Moghimi, Berk Sunar, Thomas Eisenbarth, and Nadia Heninger. Abstract: Trusted Platform Module TPM serves as a hardware-based root of trust that protects cryptographic keys from privileged system and physical...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I'm speaking on "Securing a World of Physically Capable Computers" at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India on December 12, 2019. The list is maintained on this page...

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...

NTSB Investigation of Fatal Driverless Car Accident

Autonomous systems are going to have to do much better than this. The Uber car that hit and killed Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Ariz., in March 2018 could not recognize all pedestrians, and was being driven by an operator likely distracted by streaming video, according to documents released by the...

Identifying and Arresting Ransomware Criminals

The Wall Street Journal has a story about how two people were identified as the perpetrators of a ransomware scheme. They were found because -- as generally happens -- they made mistakes covering their tracks. They were investigated because they had the bad luck of locking up Washington, DC's vid...

Fooling Voice Assistants with Lasers

Interesting: Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are vulnerable to attacks that use lasers to inject inaudible­ -- and sometimes invisible­ -- commands into the devices and surreptitiously cause them to unlock doors, visit websites, and locate, unlock, and start vehicles, researchers report in a...

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...

xHelper Malware for Android

xHelper is not interesting because of its infection mechanism; the user has to side-load an app onto his phone. It's not interesting because of its payload; it seems to do nothing more than show unwanted ads. it's interesting because of its persistence: Furthermore, even if users spot the xHelper...