Russian Censorship of Telegram

Internet censors have a new strategy in their bid to block applications and websites: pressuring the large cloud providers that host them. These providers have concerns that are much broader than the targets of censorship efforts, so they have the choice of either standing up to the censors or...

New iPhone OS May Include Device-Unlocking Security

iOS 12, the next release of Apple's iPhone operating system, may include features to prevent someone from unlocking your phone without your permission: The feature essentially forces users to unlock the iPhone with the passcode when connecting it to a USB accessory everytime the phone has not bee...

Router Vulnerability and the VPNFilter Botnet

On May 25, the FBI asked us all to reboot our routers. The story behind this request is one of sophisticated malware and unsophisticated home-network security, and it's a harbinger of the sorts of pervasive threats ­ from nation-states, criminals and hackers ­ that we should expect in coming year...

Friday Squid Blogging: Extinct Relatives of Squid

Interesting fossils. Note that a poster is available. 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 Data Privacy Regulations

When Marc Zuckerberg testified before both the House and the Senate last month, it became immediately obvious that few US lawmakers had any appetite to regulate the pervasive surveillance taking place on the Internet. Right now, the only way we can force these companies to take our privacy more...

An Example of Deterrence in Cyberspace

In 2016, the US was successfully deterred from attacking Russia in cyberspace because of fears of Russian capabilities against the US. I have two citations for this. The first is from the book Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, by Michae...

The Habituation of Security Warnings

We all know that it happens: when we see a security warning too often -- and without effect -- we start tuning it out. A new paper uses fMRI, eye tracking, and field studies to prove it. EDITED TO ADD 6/6: This blog post summarizes the findings...

Regulating Bitcoin

Ross Anderson has a new paper on cryptocurrency exchanges. From his blog: Bitcoin Redux explains what's going wrong in the world of cryptocurrencies. The bitcoin exchanges are developing into a shadow banking system, which do not give their customers actual bitcoin but rather display a "balance"...

E-Mail Vulnerabilities and Disclosure

Last week, researchers disclosed vulnerabilities in a large number of encrypted e-mail clients: specifically, those that use OpenPGP and S/MIME, including Thunderbird and AppleMail. These are serious vulnerabilities: An attacker who can alter mail sent to a vulnerable client can trick that client...

Friday Squid Blogging: Do Cephalopods Contain Alien DNA?

Maybe not DNA, but biological somethings. "Cause of Cambrian explosion -- Terrestrial or Cosmic?": Abstract: We review the salient evidence consistent with or predicted by the Hoyle-Wickramasinghe H-W thesis of Cometary Cosmic Biology. Much of this physical and biological evidence is...

Damaging Hard Drives with an Ultrasonic Attack

Playing a sound over the speakers can cause computers to crash and possibly even physically damage the hard drive. Academic paper...

1834: The First Cyberattack

Tom Standage has a great story of the first cyberattack against a telegraph network. The Blanc brothers traded government bonds at the exchange in the city of Bordeaux, where information about market movements took several days to arrive from Paris by mail coach. Accordingly, traders who could ge...

Numbers Stations

On numbers stations...

Kidnapping Fraud

Fake kidnapping fraud: "Most commonly we have unsolicited calls to potential victims in Australia, purporting to represent the people in authority in China and suggesting to intending victims here they have been involved in some sort of offence in China or elsewhere, for which they're being held...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Comic

It's not very good, but it has a squid in it. 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 2018)

I'm at Carnegie Mellon University, at the eleventh Workshop on Security and Human Behavior. SHB is a small invitational gathering of people studying various aspects of the human side of security, organized each year by Alessandro Acquisti, Ross Anderson, and myself. The 50 or so people in the roo...

Detecting Lies through Mouse Movements

Interesting research: "The detection of faked identity using unexpected questions and mouse dynamics," by Merulin Monaro, Luciano Gamberini, and Guiseppe Sartori. Abstract: The detection of faked identities is a major problem in security. Current memory-detection techniques cannot be used as they...

Font Steganography

Interesting research in steganography at the font level...

Supermarket Shoplifting

The rise of self-checkout has caused a corresponding rise in shoplifting...

Another Spectre-Like CPU Vulnerability

Google and Microsoft researchers have disclosed another Spectre-like CPU side-channel vulnerability, called "Speculative Store Bypass." Like the others, the fix will slow the CPU down. The German tech site Heise reports that more are coming. I'm not surprised. Writing about Spectre and Meltdown i...

Japan's Directorate for Signals Intelligence

The Intercept has a long article on Japan's equivalent of the NSA: the Directorate for Signals Intelligence. Interesting, but nothing really surprising. The directorate has a history that dates back to the 1950s; its role is to eavesdrop on communications. But its operations remain so highly...

Friday Squid Blogging: Flying Squid

Flying squid are real. 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...

Maliciously Changing Someone's Address

Someone changed the address of UPS corporate headquarters to his own apartment in Chicago. The company discovered it three months later. The problem, of course, is that in the US there isn't any authentication of change-of-address submissions: According to the Postal Service, nearly 37 million...

White House Eliminates Cybersecurity Position

The White House has eliminated the cybersecurity coordinator position. This seems like a spectacularly bad idea...

Accessing Cell Phone Location Information

The New York Times is reporting about a company called Securus Technologies that gives police the ability to track cell phone locations without a warrant: The service can find the whereabouts of almost any cellphone in the country within seconds. It does this by going through a system typically...

Sending Inaudible Commands to Voice Assistants

Researchers have demonstrated the ability to send inaudible commands to voice assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant. Over the last two years, researchers in China and the United States have begun demonstrating that they can send hidden commands that are undetectable to the human ear t...

Details on a New PGP Vulnerability

A new PGP vulnerability was announced today. Basically, the vulnerability makes use of the fact that modern e-mail programs allow for embedded HTML objects. Essentially, if an attacker can intercept and modify a message in transit, he can insert code that sends the plaintext in a URL to a remote...

Critical PGP Vulnerability

EFF is reporting that a critical vulnerability has been discovered in PGP and S/MIME. No details have been published yet, but one of the researchers wrote: We'll publish critical vulnerabilities in PGP/GPG and S/MIME email encryption on 2018-05-15 07:00 UTC. They might reveal the plaintext of...

Friday Squid Blogging: How the Squid Lost Its Shell

Squids used to have shells. 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...

Airline Ticket Fraud

New research: "Leaving on a jet plane: the trade in fraudulently obtained airline tickets:" Abstract: Every day, hundreds of people fly on airline tickets that have been obtained fraudulently. This crime script analysis provides an overview of the trade in these tickets, drawing on interviews wit...

Supply-Chain Security

Earlier this month, the Pentagon stopped selling phones made by the Chinese companies ZTE and Huawei on military bases because they might be used to spy on their users. It's a legitimate fear, and perhaps a prudent action. But it's just one instance of the much larger issue of securing our supply...

Virginia Beach Police Want Encrypted Radios

This article says that the Virginia Beach police are looking to buy encrypted radios. Virginia Beach police believe encryption will prevent criminals from listening to police communications. They said officer safety would increase and citizens would be better protected. Someone should ask them if...

The US Is Unprepared for Election-Related Hacking in 2018

This survey and report is not surprising: The survey of nearly forty Republican and Democratic campaign operatives, administered through November and December 2017, revealed that American political campaign staff -- primarily working at the state and congressional levels -- are not only unprepare...

Ray Ozzie's Encryption Backdoor

Last month, Wired published a long article about Ray Ozzie and his supposed new scheme for adding a backdoor in encrypted devices. It's a weird article. It paints Ozzie's proposal as something that "attains the impossible" and "satisfies both law enforcement and privacy purists," when 1 it's bare...

Friday Squid Blogging: US Army Developing 3D-Printable Battlefield Robot Squid

The next major war will be super weird. 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...

Detecting Laptop Tampering

Micah Lee ran a two-year experiment designed to detect whether or not his laptop was ever tampered with. The results are inconclusive, but demonstrate how difficult it can be to detect laptop tampering...

LC4: Another Pen-and-Paper Cipher

Interesting symmetric cipher: LC4: Abstract: ElsieFour LC4 is a low-tech cipher that can be computed by hand; but unlike many historical ciphers, LC4 is designed to be hard to break. LC4 is intended for encrypted communication between humans only, and therefore it encrypts and decrypts plaintexts...

NIST Issues Call for "Lightweight Cryptography" Algorithms

This is interesting: Creating these defenses is the goal of NIST's lightweight cryptography initiative, which aims to develop cryptographic algorithm standards that can work within the confines of a simple electronic device. Many of the sensors, actuators and other micromachines that will functio...

IoT Inspector Tool from Princeton

Researchers at Princeton University have released IoT Inspector, a tool that analyzes the security and privacy of IoT devices by examining the data they send across the Internet. They've already used the tool to study a bunch of different IoT devices. From their blog post: Finding 3: Many IoT...

Security Vulnerabilities in VingCard Electronic Locks

Researchers have disclosed a massive vulnerability in the VingCard eletronic lock system, used in hotel rooms around the world: With a $300 Proxmark RFID card reading and writing tool, any expired keycard pulled from the trash of a target hotel, and a set of cryptographic tricks developed over...

Friday Squid Blogging: Bizarre Contorted Squid

This bizarre contorted squid might be a new species, or a previously known species exhibiting a new behavior. No one knows. 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...

TSB Bank Disaster

This seems like an absolute disaster: The very short version is that a UK bank, TSB, which had been merged into and then many years later was spun out of Lloyds Bank, was bought by the Spanish bank Banco Sabadell in 2015. Lloyds had continued to run the TSB systems and was to transfer them over t...

New NSA/Cyber Command Head Confirmed by Senate

It's Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone. I know nothing about him...

Two NSA Algorithms Rejected by the ISO

The ISO has rejected two symmetric encryption algorithms: SIMON and SPECK. These algorithms were both designed by the NSA and made public in 2013. They are optimized for small and low-cost processors like IoT devices. The risk of using NSA-designed ciphers, of course, is that they include...

Baseball Code

Info on the coded signals used by the Colorado Rockies...

Computer Alarm that Triggers When Lid Is Opened

"Do Not Disturb" is a Macintosh app that send an alert when the lid is opened. The idea is to detect computer tampering. Wired article: Do Not Disturb goes a step further than just the push notification. Using the Do Not Disturb iOS app, a notified user can send themselves a picture snapped with...

Russia is Banning Telegram

Russia has banned the secure messaging app Telegram. It's making an absolute mess of the ban -- blocking 16 million IP addresses, many belonging to the Amazon and Google clouds -- and it's not even clear that it's working. But, more importantly, I'm not convinced Telegram is secure in the first...

Yet Another Biometric: Ear Shape

This acoustic technology identifies individuals by their ear shapes. No information about either false positives or false negatives...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Prices Rise as Catch Decreases

In Japan: Last year's haul sank 15% to 53,000 tons, according to the JF Zengyoren national federation of fishing cooperatives. The squid catch has fallen by half in just two years. The previous low was plumbed in 2016. Lighter catches have been blamed on changing sea temperatures, which impedes t...

Securing Elections

Elections serve two purposes. The first, and obvious, purpose is to accurately choose the winner. But the second is equally important: to convince the loser. To the extent that an election system is not transparently and auditably accurate, it fails in that second purpose. Our election systems ar...