They’re better for the environment. Blog moderation policy. | Continue reading
This isn’t good: On Thursday, researchers from security firm Binarly revealed that Secure Boot is completely compromised on more than 200 device models sold by Acer, Dell, Gigabyte, Intel, and Supermicro. The cause: a cryptographic key underpinning Secure Boot on those models tha … | Continue reading
Friday’s massive internet outage, caused by a mid-sized tech company called CrowdStrike, disrupted major airlines, hospitals, and banks. Nearly 7,000 flights were canceled. It took down 911 systems and factories, courthouses, and television stations. Tallying the total cost will … | Continue reading
I am the Chief of Security Architecture at Inrupt, Inc., the company that is commercializing Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid open W3C standard for distributed data ownership. This week, we announced a digital wallet based on the Solid architecture. Details are here, but basically a digit … | Continue reading
Supposedly the DHS has these: The robot, called “NEO,” is a modified version of the “Quadruped Unmanned Ground Vehicle” (Q-UGV) sold to law enforcement by a company called Ghost Robotics. Benjamine Huffman, the director of DHS’s Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers (FLETC), t … | Continue reading
It’s heavily redacted, but still interesting. Many more ODNI documents here. | Continue reading
This is a fantastic video. It’s an Iranian spider-tailed horned viper (Pseudocerastes urarachnoides). Its tail looks like a spider, which the snake uses to fool passing birds looking for a meal. | Continue reading
Peru is trying to protect its territorial waters from Chinese squid-fishing boats. Blog moderation policy. | Continue reading
Brett Solomon is retiring from AccessNow after fifteen years as its Executive Director. He’s written a blog post about what he’s learned and what comes next. | Continue reading
This is pretty horrific: …a group of men behind a violent crime spree designed to compel victims to hand over access to their cryptocurrency savings. That announcement and the criminal complaint laying out charges against St. Felix focused largely on a single theft of cryptocurre … | Continue reading
6.8%, to be precise. From ZDNet: However, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks continue to be cybercriminals’ weapon of choice, making up over 37% of all mitigated traffic. The scale of these attacks is staggering. In the first quarter of 2024 alone, Cloudflare blocked 4. … | Continue reading
Some scholars are inflating their reference counts by sneaking them into metadata: Citations of scientific work abide by a standardized referencing system: Each reference explicitly mentions at least the title, authors’ names, publication year, journal or conference name, and pag … | Continue reading
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking on “Reimagining Democracy in the Age of AI” at the Bozeman Library in Bozeman, Montana, USA, July 18, 2024. The event will also be available via Zoom. I’m speaking at the TEDxBillings Democracy Event i … | Continue reading
I didn’t know: In 1994, Hewlett-Packard released a miracle machine: the HP 200LX pocket-size PC. In the depths of the device, among the MS-DOS productivity apps built into its fixed memory, there lurked a first-person maze game called Lair of Squid. […] In Lair of Squid, you’re t … | Continue reading
The NSA has a video recording of a 1982 lecture by Adm. Grace Hopper titled “Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People.” The agency is (so far) refusing to release it. Basically, the recording is in an obscure video format. People at the NSA can’t easily watch it … | Continue reading
Not a lot of details: Apple has issued a new round of threat notifications to iPhone users across 98 countries, warning them of potential mercenary spyware attacks. It’s the second such alert campaign from the company this year, following a similar notification sent to users in 9 … | Continue reading
New attack against the RADIUS authentication protocol: The Blast-RADIUS attack allows a man-in-the-middle attacker between the RADIUS client and server to forge a valid protocol accept message in response to a failed authentication request. This forgery could give the attacker ac … | Continue reading
Interesting: By reverse-engineering how Ticketmaster and AXS actually make their electronic tickets, scalpers have essentially figured out how to regenerate specific, genuine tickets that they have legally purchased from scratch onto infrastructure that they control. In doing so, … | Continue reading
ProPublica has a long investigative article on how the Cyber Safety Review Board failed to investigate the SolarWinds attack, and specifically Microsoft’s culpability, even though they were directed by President Biden to do so. | Continue reading
A new vampire squid species was discovered in the South China Sea. Blog moderation policy. | Continue reading
It’s a serious one: The vulnerability, which is a signal handler race condition in OpenSSH’s server (sshd), allows unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) as root on glibc-based Linux systems; that presents a significant security risk. This race condition affects sshd in its … | Continue reading
This article about an app that lets people remotely view bars to see if they’re crowded or not is filled with commentary—on both sides—about privacy and openness. | Continue reading
If you’ve been reading my blog, you’ve noticed that I have written a lot about AI and democracy, mostly with my co-author Nathan Sanders. I am pleased to announce that we’re writing a book on the topic. This isn’t a book about deep fakes, or misinformation. This is a book about w … | Continue reading
A new paper, “Polynomial Time Cryptanalytic Extraction of Neural Network Models,” by Adi Shamir and others, uses ideas from differential cryptanalysis to extract the weights inside a neural network using specific queries and their results. This is much more theoretical than pract … | Continue reading
A new squid species—of the Gonatidae family—was discovered. The video shows her holding a brood of very large eggs. Research paper. | Continue reading
Longtime NSA-watcher James Bamford has a long article on the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). | Continue reading
A group of cryptographers have analyzed the eiDAS 2.0 regulation (electronic identification and trust services) that defines the new EU Digital Identity Wallet. | Continue reading
This move has been coming for a long time. The Biden administration on Thursday said it’s banning the company from selling its products to new US-based customers starting on July 20, with the company only allowed to provide software updates to existing customers through September … | Continue reading
Interesting paper about a German cryptanalysis machine that helped break the US M-209 mechanical ciphering machine. The paper contains a good description of how the M-209 works. | Continue reading
Former NSA Director Paul Nakasone has joined the board of OpenAI. | Continue reading
Beautiful astronomical photo. | Continue reading
The memorial service for Ross Anderson will be held on Saturday, at 2:00 PM BST. People can attend remotely on Zoom. (The passcode is “L3954FrrEF”.) | Continue reading
Interesting summary of various ways to derive the public key from digitally signed files. Normally, with a signature scheme, you have the public key and want to know whether a given signature is valid. But what if we instead have a message and a signature, assume the signature is … | Continue reading
There has been a lot of toxicity in the comments section of this blog. Recently, we’re having to delete more and more comments. Not just spam and off-topic comments, but also sniping and personal attacks. It’s gotten so bad that I need to do something. My options are limited beca … | Continue reading
Culture is increasingly mediated through algorithms. These algorithms have splintered the organization of culture, a result of states and tech companies vying for influence over mass audiences. One byproduct of this splintering is a shift from imperfect but broad cultural narrati … | Continue reading
There is a lot written about technology’s threats to democracy. Polarization. Artificial intelligence. The concentration of wealth and power. I have a more general story: The political and economic systems of governance that were created in the mid-18th century are poorly suited … | Continue reading
Interesting research: “Teams of LLM Agents can Exploit Zero-Day Vulnerabilities.” Abstract: LLM agents have become increasingly sophisticated, especially in the realm of cybersecurity. Researchers have shown that LLM agents can exploit real-world vulnerabilities when given a desc … | Continue reading
Squid humor. 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. | Continue reading
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m appearing on a panel on Society and Democracy at ACM Collective Intelligence in Boston, Massachusetts. The conference runs from June 26 through 29, 2024, and my panel is at 9:00 AM on Friday, June 28. I’m speak … | Continue reading
This is really neat demo of the security problems arising from reusing nonces with a symmetric cipher in GCM mode. | Continue reading
As India concluded the world’s largest election on June 5, 2024, with over 640 million votes counted, observers could assess how the various parties and factions used artificial intelligence technologies—and what lessons that holds for the rest of the world. The campaigns made ex … | Continue reading
Public polling is a critical function of modern political campaigns and movements, but it isn’t what it once was. Recent US election cycles have produced copious postmortems explaining both the successes and the flaws of public polling. There are two main reasons polling fails. F … | Continue reading
New research: “Deception abilities emerged in large language models“: Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are currently at the forefront of intertwining AI systems with human communication and everyday life. Thus, aligning them with human values is of great importance. However … | Continue reading
Interesting research: “Hyperlink Hijacking: Exploiting Erroneous URL Links to Phantom Domains“: Abstract: Web users often follow hyperlinks hastily, expecting them to be correctly programmed. However, it is possible those links contain typos or other mistakes. By discovering acti … | Continue reading
Peru has set a lower squid quota for 2024. The article says “giant squid,” but that seems wrong. We don’t eat those. 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. | Continue reading
This week, I hosted the seventeenth Workshop on Security and Human Behavior at the Harvard Kennedy School. This is the first workshop since our co-founder, Ross Anderson, died unexpectedly. SHB is a small, annual, invitational workshop of people studying various aspects of the hu … | Continue reading
The US Justice Department has dismantled an enormous botnet: According to an indictment unsealed on May 24, from 2014 through July 2022, Wang and others are alleged to have created and disseminated malware to compromise and amass a network of millions of residential Windows compu … | Continue reading
The US is using a World War II law that bans aircraft photography of military installations to charge someone with doing the same thing with a drone. | Continue reading