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Ghidra: NSA's Reverse-Engineering Tool
Last month, the NSA released Ghidra, a software reverse-engineering tool. Early reactions are uniformly positive. Three news articles...
Friday Squid Blogging: Fried Squid Recipe
This is an easy fried squid recipe with saffron and agrodolce. 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...
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...
Former Mozilla CTO Harassed at the US Border
This is a pretty awful story of how Andreas Gal, former Mozilla CTO and US citizen, was detained and threatened at the US border. CBP agents demanded that he unlock his phone and computer. Know your rights when you enter the US. The EFF publishes a handy guide. And if you want to encrypt your...
Adversarial Machine Learning against Tesla's Autopilot
Researchers have been able to fool Tesla's autopilot in a variety of ways, including convincing it to drive into oncoming traffic. It requires the placement of stickers on the road. Abstract: Keen Security Lab has maintained the security research work on Tesla vehicle and shared our research...
How Political Campaigns Use Personal Data
Really interesting report from Tactical Tech. Data-driven technologies are an inevitable feature of modern political campaigning. Some argue that they are a welcome addition to politics as normal and a necessary and modern approach to democratic processes; others say that they are corrosive and...
Hacking Instagram to Get Free Meals in Exchange for Positive Reviews
This is a fascinating hack: In today's digital age, a large Instagram audience is considered a valuable currency. I had also heard through the grapevine that I could monetize a large following -- or in my desired case -- use it to have my meals paid for. So I did just that. I created an Instagram...
Recovering Smartphone Typing from Microphone Sounds
Yet another side-channel attack on smartphones: "Hearing your touch: A new acoustic side channel on smartphones," by Ilia Shumailov, Laurent Simon, Jeff Yan, and Ross Anderson. Abstract: We present the first acoustic side-channel attack that recovers what users type on the virtual keyboard of the...
Friday Squid Blogging: Restoring the Giant Squid at the Museum of Natural History
It is traveling to Paris. 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...
NSA-Inspired Vulnerability Found in Huawei Laptops
This is an interesting story of a serious vulnerability in a Huawei driver that Microsoft found. The vulnerability is similar in style to the NSA's DOUBLEPULSAR that was leaked by the Shadow Brokers -- believed to be the Russian government -- and it's obvious that this attack copied that techniqu...
Malware Installed in Asus Computers through Hacked Update Process
Kaspersky Labs is reporting on a new supply chain attack they call "Shadowhammer." In January 2019, we discovered a sophisticated supply chain attack involving the ASUS Live Update Utility. The attack took place between June and November 2018 and according to our telemetry, it affected a large...
Programmers Who Don't Understand Security Are Poor at Security
A university study confirmed the obvious: if you pay a random bunch of freelance programmers a small amount of money to write security software, they're not going to do a very good job at it. In an experiment that involved 43 programmers hired via the Freelancer.com platform, University of Bonn...
Personal Data Left on Used Laptops
A recent experiment found all sorts of personal data left on used laptops and smartphones. This should come as no surprise. Simson Garfinkel performed the same experiment in 2003, with similar results...
Mail Fishing
Not email, paper mail: Thieves, often at night, use string to lower glue-covered rodent traps or bottles coated with an adhesive down the chute of a sidewalk mailbox. This bait attaches to the envelopes inside, and the fish in this case -- mail containing gift cards, money orders or checks, which...
Friday Squid Blogging: New Research on Squid Camouflage
From the New York Times: Now, a paper published last week in Nature Communications suggests that their chromatophores, previously thought to be mainly pockets of pigment embedded in their skin, are also equipped with tiny reflectors made of proteins. These reflectors aid the squid to produce such...
Enigma, Typex, and Bombe Simulators
GCHQ has put simulators for the Enigma, Typex, and Bombe on the Internet. News article...
First Look Media Shutting Down Access to Snowden NSA Archives
The Daily Beast is reporting that First Look Media -- home of The Intercept and Glenn Greenwald -- is shutting down access to the Snowden archives. The Intercept was the home for Greenwald's subset of Snowden's NSA documents since 2014, after he parted ways with the Guardian the year before. I...
Zipcar Disruption
This isn't a security story, but it easily could have been. Last Saturday, Zipcar had a system outage: "an outage experienced by a third party telecommunications vendor disrupted connections between the company's vehicles and its reservation software." That didn't just mean people couldn't get ca...
An Argument that Cybersecurity Is Basically Okay
Andrew Odlyzko's new essay is worth reading -- "Cybersecurity is not very important": Abstract: There is a rising tide of security breaches. There is an even faster rising tide of hysteria over the ostensible reason for these breaches, namely the deficient state of our information infrastructure...
Triton
Good article on the Triton malware which targets industrial control systems...
CAs Reissue Over One Million Weak Certificates
Turns out that the software a bunch of CAs used to generate public-key certificates was flawed: they created random serial numbers with only 63 bits instead of the required 64. That may not seem like a big deal to the layman, but that one bit change means that the serial numbers only have half th...
Friday Squid Blogging: A Squid-Related Vacation Tour in Hawaii
You can hunt for the Hawaiian bobtail 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...
I Was Cited in a Court Decision
An article I co-wrote -- my first law journal article -- was cited by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court -- the state supreme court -- in a case on compelled decryption. Here's the first, in footnote 1: We understand the word "password" to be synonymous with other terms that cell phone user...
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I'm teaching a live online class called "Spotlight on Cloud: The Future of Internet Security with Bruce Schneier" on O'Reilly's learning platform, Thursday, April 4, at 10:00 AM PT/1:00 PM ET. The list is maintained on this page...
Critical Flaw in Swiss Internet Voting System
Researchers have found a critical flaw in the Swiss Internet voting system. I was going to write an essay about how this demonstrates that Internet voting is a stupid idea and should never be attempted -- and that this system in particular should never be deployed, even if the found flaw is fixed...
DARPA Is Developing an Open-Source Voting System
This sounds like a good development: ...a new $10 million contract the Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA has launched to design and build a secure voting system that it hopes will be impervious to hacking. The first-of-its-kind system will be designed by an...
Judging Facebook's Privacy Shift
Facebook is making a new and stronger commitment to privacy. Last month, the company hired three of its most vociferous critics and installed them in senior technical positions. And on Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg wrote that the company will pivot to focus on private conversations over the public...
On Surveillance in the Workplace
Data & Society just published a report entitled "Workplace Monitoring & Surveillance": This explainer highlights four broad trends in employee monitoring and surveillance technologies: Prediction and flagging tools that aim to predict characteristics or behaviors of employees or that are designed...
Russia Is Testing Online Voting
This is a bad idea: A second innovation will allow "electronic absentee voting" within voters' home precincts. In other words, Russia is set to introduce its first online voting system. The system will be tested in a Moscow neighborhood that will elect a single member to the capital's city counci...
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Proteins Can Be an Alternative to Plastic
Is there anything squids aren't good for? Academic paper. 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...
Videos and Links from the Public-Interest Technology Track at the RSA Conference
Yesterday at the RSA Conference, I gave a keynote talk about the role of public-interest technologists in cybersecurity. Video here. I also hosted a one-day mini-track on the topic. We had six panels, and they were all great. If you missed it live, we have videos: How Public Interest Technologist...
Cybersecurity Insurance Not Paying for NotPetya Losses
This will complicate things: To complicate matters, having cyber insurance might not cover everyone's losses. Zurich American Insurance Company refused to pay out a $100 million claim from Mondelez, saying that since the U.S. and other governments labeled the NotPetya attack as an action by the...
Detecting Shoplifting Behavior
This system claims to detect suspicious behavior that indicates shoplifting: Vaak, a Japanese startup, has developed artificial intelligence software that hunts for potential shoplifters, using footage from security cameras for fidgeting, restlessness and other potentially suspicious body languag...
Letterlocking
Really good article on the now-lost art of letterlocking...
Digital Signatures in PDFs Are Broken
Researchers have demonstrated spoofing of digital signatures in PDF files. This would matter more if PDF digital signatures were widely used. Still, the researchers have worked with the various companies that make PDF readers to close the vulnerabilities. You should update your software. Details...
Cybersecurity for the Public Interest
The Crypto Wars have been waging off-and-on for a quarter-century. On one side is law enforcement, which wants to be able to break encryption, to access devices and communications of terrorists and criminals. On the other are almost every cryptographer and computer security expert, repeatedly...
The Latest in Creepy Spyware
The Nest home alarm system shipped with a secret microphone, which -- according to the company -- was only an accidental secret: On Tuesday, a Google spokesperson told Business Insider the company had made an "error." "The on-device microphone was never intended to be a secret and should have bee...
Friday Squid Blogging: Chinese Squid-Processing Facility
China is building the largest squid processing center in the world. 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...
Data Leakage from Encrypted Databases
Matthew Green has a super-interesting blog post about information leakage from encrypted databases. It describes the recent work by Paul Grubbs, Marie-Sarah Lacharité, Brice Minaud, and Kenneth G. Paterson. Even the summary is too much to summarize, so read it...
Can Everybody Read the US Terrorist Watch List?
After years of claiming that the Terrorist Screening Database is kept secret within the government, we have now learned that the DHS shares it "with more than 1,400 private entities, including hospitals and universities...." Critics say that the watchlist is wildly overbroad and mismanaged, and...
"Insider Threat" Detection Software
Notice this bit from an article on the arrest of Christopher Hasson: It was only after Hasson's arrest last Friday at his workplace that the chilling plans prosecutors assert he was crafting became apparent, detected by an internal Coast Guard program that watches for any "insider threat." The...
Attacking Soldiers on Social Media
A research group at NATO's Strategic Communications Center of Excellence catfished soldiers involved in an European military exercise -- we don't know what country they were from -- to demonstrate the power of the attack technique. Over four weeks, the researchers developed fake pages and closed...
On the Security of Password Managers
There's new research on the security of password managers, specifically 1Password, Dashlane, KeePass, and Lastpass. This work specifically looks at password leakage on the host computer. That is, does the password manager accidentally leave plaintext copies of the password lying around memory? Al...
Friday Squid Blogging: A Tracking Device for Squid
Really: After years of "making do" with the available technology for his squid studies, Mooney created a versatile tag that allows him to research squid behavior. With the help of Kakani Katija, an engineer adapting the tag for jellyfish at California's Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute...
Gen. Nakasone on US Cyber Command
Really interesting article by and interview with Paul M. Nakasone Commander of US Cyber Command, Director of the National Security Agency, and Chief of the Central Security Service in the current issue of Joint Forces Quarterly. He talks about the evolving role of US Cyber Command, and its new...
Reverse Location Search Warrants
The police are increasingly getting search warrants for information about all cell phones in a certain location at a certain time: Police departments across the country have been knocking at Google's door for at least the last two years with warrants to tap into the company's extensive stores of...
Details on Recent DNS Hijacking
At the end of January, the US Department of Homeland Security issued a warning regarding serious DNS hijacking attempts against US government domains. Brian Krebs wrote an excellent article detailing the attacks and their implications. Strongly recommended...
Estonia's Volunteer Cyber Militia
Interesting -- although short and not very detailed -- article about Estonia's volunteer cyber-defense militia. Padar's militia of amateur IT workers, economists, lawyers, and other white-hat types are grouped in the city of Tartu, about 65 miles from the Russian border, and in the capital,...
I Am Not Associated with Swift Recovery Ltd.
It seems that someone from a company called Swift Recovery Ltd. is impersonating me -- at least on Telegram. The person is using a photo of me, and is using details of my life available on Wikipedia to convince people that they are me. They are not. If anyone has any more information -- stories,...