Regulating International Trade in Commercial Spyware

Siena Anstis, Ronald J. Deibert, and John Scott-Railton of Citizen Lab published an editorial calling for regulating the international trade in commercial surveillance systems until we can figure out how to curb human rights abuses. Any regime of rigorous human rights safeguards that would make a...

Friday Squid Blogging: Piglet Squid Video

Really neat. 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...

More on Backdooring (or Not) WhatsApp

Yesterday, I blogged about a Facebook plan to backdoor WhatsApp by adding client-side scanning and filtering. It seems that I was wrong, and there are no such plans. The only source for that post was a Forbes essay by Kalev Leetaru, which links to a previous Forbes essay by him, which links to a...

Disabling Security Cameras with Lasers

There's a really interesting video of protesters in Hong Kong using some sort of laser to disable security cameras. I know nothing more about the technologies involved...

How Privacy Laws Hurt Defendants

Rebecca Wexler has an interesting op-ed about an inadvertent harm that privacy laws can cause: while law enforcement can often access third-party data to aid in prosecution, the accused don't have the same level of access to aid in their defense: The proposed privacy laws would make this situatio...

Facebook Plans on Backdooring WhatsApp

This article points out that Facebook's planned content moderation scheme will result in an encryption backdoor into WhatsApp: In Facebook's vision, the actual end-to-end encryption client itself such as WhatsApp will include embedded content moderation and blacklist filtering algorithms. These...

Another Attack Against Driverless Cars

In this piece of research, attackers successfully attack a driverless car system -- Renault Captur's "Level 0" autopilot Level 0 systems advise human drivers but do not directly operate cars -- by following them with drones that project images of fake road signs in 100ms bursts. The time is too...

ACLU on the GCHQ Backdoor Proposal

Back in January, two senior GCHQ officials proposed a specific backdoor for communications systems. It was universally derided as unworkable -- by me, as well. Now Jon Callas of the ACLU explains why...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Humbolt Squid in Mexico Are Getting Smaller

The Humbolt squid are getting smaller: Rawley and the other researchers found a flurry of factors that drove the jumbo squid's demise. The Gulf of California historically cycled between warm-water El Niño conditions and cool-water La Niña phases. The warm El Niño waters were inhospitable to jumbo...

Insider Logic Bombs

Add to the "not very smart criminals" file: According to court documents, Tinley provided software services for Siemens' Monroeville, PA offices for nearly ten years. Among the work he was asked to perform was the creation of spreadsheets that the company was using to manage equipment orders. The...

Software Developers and Security

According to a survey: "68% of the security professionals surveyed believe it's a programmer's job to write secure code, but they also think less than half of developers can spot security holes." And that's a problem. Nearly half of security pros surveyed, 49%, said they struggle to get developer...

Attorney General William Barr on Encryption Policy

Yesterday, Attorney General William Barr gave a major speech on encryption policy -- what is commonly known as "going dark." Speaking at Fordham University in New York, he admitted that adding backdoors decreases security but that it is worth it. Some hold this view dogmatically, claiming that it...

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...

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Mural

Large squid mural in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. 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...

A Harlequin Romance Novel about Hackers

Really...

John Paul Stevens Was a Cryptographer

I didn't know that Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens "was also a cryptographer for the Navy during World War II." He was a proponent of individual privacy...

Identity Theft on the Job Market

Identity theft is getting more subtle: "My job application was withdrawn by someone pretending to be me": When Mr Fearn applied for a job at the company he didn't hear back. He said the recruitment team said they'd get back to him by Friday, but they never did. At first, he assumed he was...

Zoom Vulnerability

The Zoom conferencing app has a vulnerability that allows someone to remotely take over the computer's camera. It's a bad vulnerability, made worse by the fact that it remains even if you uninstall the Zoom app: This vulnerability allows any website to forcibly join a user to a Zoom call, with...

Palantir's Surveillance Service for Law Enforcement

Motherboard got its hands on Palantir's Gotham user's manual, which is used by the police to get information on people: The Palantir user guide shows that police can start with almost no information about a person of interest and instantly know extremely intimate details about their lives. The...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I'm speaking at Black Hat USA 2019 in Las Vegas on Wednesday, August 7 and Thursday, August 8, 2019. I'm speaking on "Information Security in the Public Interest" at DefCon 27 in Las Vegas on Saturday, August 10, 2019. The list is...

Friday Squid Blogging: When the Octopus and Squid Lost Their Shells

Cephalopod ancestors once had shells. When did they lose them? With the molecular clock technique, which allowed him to use DNA to map out the evolutionary history of the cephalopods, he found that today's cuttlefish, squids and octopuses began to appear 160 to 100 million years ago, during the...

Clickable Endnotes to Click Here to Kill Everybody

In Click Here to Kill Everybody, I promised clickable endnotes. They're finally available...

Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang Has Quantum Encryption Policy

At least one presidential candidate has a policy about quantum computing and encryption. It has two basic planks. One: fund quantum-resistant encryption standards. Note: NIST is already doing this. Two, fund quantum computing. Unlike many far more pressing computer security problems, the market...

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...

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...

Cell Networks Hacked by (Probable) Nation-State Attackers

A sophisticated attacker has successfuly infiltrated cell providers to collect information on specific users: The hackers have systematically broken in to more than 10 cell networks around the world to date over the past seven years to obtain massive amounts of call records -- including times and...

Cardiac Biometric

MIT Technology Review is reporting about an infrared laser device that can identify people by their unique cardiac signature at a distance: A new device, developed for the Pentagon after US Special Forces requested it, can identify people without seeing their face: instead it detects their unique...

Ransomware Recovery Firms Who Secretly Pay Hackers

ProPublica is reporting on companies that pretend to recover data locked up by ransomware, but just secretly pay the hackers and then mark up the cost to the victims...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Cars

Jalopnik asks the important question: "If squids ruled the earth, what would their cars be like?" 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...

Applied Cryptography is Banned in Oregon Prisons

My Applied Cryptography is on a list of books banned in Oregon prisons. It's not me -- and it's not cryptography -- it's that the prisons ban books that teach people to code. The subtitle is "Algorithms, Protocols, and Source Code in C" -- and that's the reason. My more recent Cryptography...

Research on Human Honesty

New research from Science: "Civic honesty around the globe": Abstract: Civic honesty is essential to social capital and economic development, but is often in conflict with material self-interest. We examine the trade-off between honesty and self-interest using field experiments in 355 cities...

US Journalist Detained When Returning to US

Pretty horrible story of a US journalist who had his computer and phone searched at the border when returning to the US from Mexico. After I gave him the password to my iPhone, Moncivias spent three hours reviewing hundreds of photos and videos and emails and calls and texts, including encrypted...

Digital License Plates

They're a thing: Developers say digital plates utilize "advanced telematics" -- to collect tolls, pay for parking and send out Amber Alerts when a child is abducted. They also help recover stolen vehicles by changing the display to read "Stolen," thereby alerting everyone within eyeshot. This mak...

Google Releases Basic Homomorphic Encryption Tool

Google has released an open-source cryptographic tool: Private Join and Compute. From a Wired article: Private Join and Compute uses a 1970s methodology known as "commutative encryption" to allow data in the data sets to be encrypted with multiple keys, without it mattering which order the keys a...

Yubico Security Keys with a Crypto Flaw

Wow, is this an embarrassing bug: Yubico is recalling a line of security keys used by the U.S. government due to a firmware flaw. The company issued a security advisory today that warned of an issue in YubiKey FIPS Series devices with firmware versions 4.4.2 and 4.4.4 that reduced the randomness ...

Friday Squid Blogging: Fantastic Video of a Juvenile Giant Squid

It's amazing: Then, about 20 hours into the recording from the Medusa's fifth deployment, Dr. Robinson saw the sharp points of tentacles sneaking into the camera's view. "My heart felt like exploding," he said on Thursday, over a shaky phone connection from the ship's bridge. At first, the animal...

I'm Leaving IBM

Today is my last day at IBM. If you've been following along, IBM bought my startup Resilient Systems in Spring 2016. Since then, I have been with IBM, holding the nicely ambiguous title of "Special Advisor." As of the end of the month, I will be back on my own. I will continue to write and speak,...

Cellebrite Claims It Can Unlock Any iPhone

The digital forensics company Cellebrite now claims it can unlock any iPhone. I dithered before blogging this, not wanting to give the company more publicity. But I decided that everyone who wants to know already knows, and that Apple already knows. It's all of us that need to know...

Spanish Soccer League App Spies on Fans

The Spanish Soccer League's smartphone app spies on fans in order to find bars that are illegally streaming its games. The app listens with the microphone for the broadcasts, and then uses geolocation to figure out where the phone is. The Spanish data protection agency has ordered the league to...

MongoDB Offers Field Level Encryption

MongoDB now has the ability to encrypt data by field: MongoDB calls the new feature Field Level Encryption. It works kind of like end-to-end encrypted messaging, which scrambles data as it moves across the internet, revealing it only to the sender and the recipient. In such a "client-side"...

Person in Latex Mask Impersonated French Minister

Forget deep fakes. Someone wearing a latex mask fooled people on video calls for a period of two years, successfully scamming 80 million euros from rich French citizens...

Florida City Pays Ransomware

Learning from the huge expenses Atlanta and Baltimore incurred by refusing to pay ransomware, the Florida City of Riveria Beach decided to pay up. The ransom amount of almost $600,000 is a lot, but much cheaper than the alternative...

iPhone Apps Surreptitiously Communicated with Unknown Servers

Long news article alternate source on iPhone privacy, specifically the enormous amount of data your apps are collecting without your knowledge. A lot of this happens in the middle of the night, when you're probably not otherwise using your phone: IPhone apps I discovered tracking me by passing...

Election Security

Stanford University's Cyber Policy Center has published a long report on the security of US elections. Summary: it's not good...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Tea Bags

It's pu'er tea -- from Japan. 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...

Backdoor Built into Android Firmware

In 2017, some Android phones came with a backdoor pre-installed: Criminals in 2017 managed to get an advanced backdoor preinstalled on Android devices before they left the factories of manufacturers, Google researchers confirmed on Thursday. Triada first came to light in 2016 in articles publishe...

Fake News and Pandemics

When the next pandemic strikes, we'll be fighting it on two fronts. The first is the one you immediately think about: understanding the disease, researching a cure and inoculating the population. The second is new, and one you might not have thought much about: fighting the deluge of rumors,...

How Apple's "Find My" Feature Works

Matthew Green intelligently speculates about how Apple's new "Find My" feature works. If you haven't already been inspired by the description above, let me phrase the question you ought to be asking: how is this system going to avoid being a massive privacy nightmare? Let me count the concerns: I...