Operation Squid found 1.3 tons of cocaine hidden in frozen fish. 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
C++ guru Herb Sutter writes about how we can improve the programming language for better security. The immediate problem “is” that it’s Too Easy By Default™ to write security and safety vulnerabilities in C++ that would have been caught by stricter enforcement of known rules for … | Continue reading
Kasmir Hill has the story: Modern cars are internet-enabled, allowing access to services like navigation, roadside assistance and car apps that drivers can connect to their vehicles to locate them or unlock them remotely. In recent years, automakers, including G.M., Honda, Kia an … | Continue reading
The arms race continues, as burglars are learning how to use jammers to disable Wi-Fi security cameras. | Continue reading
Researchers have demonstrated that putting words in ASCII art can cause LLMs—GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Gemini, Claude, and Llama2—to ignore their safety instructions. Research paper. | Continue reading
Initial results in using LLMs to unredact text based on the size of the individual-word redaction rectangles. This feels like something that a specialized ML system could be trained on. | Continue reading
Newly discovered plant looks like a squid. And it’s super weird: The plant, which grows to 3 centimetres tall and 2 centimetres wide, emerges to the surface for as little as a week each year. It belongs to a group of plants known as fairy lanterns and has been given the scientifi … | Continue reading
The Ash Center has posted a series of twelve essays stemming from the Second Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy (IWORD 2023). Aviv Ovadya, Democracy as Approximation: A Primer for “AI for Democracy” Innovators Kathryn Peters, Permission and Participation Claudia … | Continue reading
Researchers ran a global prompt hacking competition, and have documented the results in a paper that both gives a lot of good examples and tries to organize a taxonomy of effective prompt injection strategies. It seems as if the most common successful strategy is the “compound in … | Continue reading
With the world’s focus turning to misinformation, manipulation, and outright propaganda ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, we know that democracy has an AI problem. But we’re learning that AI has a democracy problem, too. Both challenges must be addressed for the sake … | Continue reading
The Washington Post is reporting on the FBI’s increasing use of push notification data—”push tokens”—to identify people. The police can request this data from companies like Apple and Google without a warrant. The investigative technique goes back years. Court orders that were is … | Continue reading
Consumer Reports has analyzed a bunch of popular Internet-connected video doorbells. Their security is terrible. First, these doorbells expose your home IP address and WiFi network name to the internet without encryption, potentially opening your home network to online criminals. … | Continue reading
Researchers have demonstrated a worm that spreads through prompt injection. Details: In one instance, the researchers, acting as attackers, wrote an email including the adversarial text prompt, which “poisons” the database of an email assistant using retrieval-augmented generatio … | Continue reading
Paleontologists have discovered a 183-million-year-old species of vampire squid. Prior research suggests that the vampyromorph lived in the shallows off an island that once existed in what is now the heart of the European mainland. The research team believes that the remarkable d … | Continue reading
NIST has released version 2.0 of the Cybersecurity Framework: The CSF 2.0, which supports implementation of the National Cybersecurity Strategy, has an expanded scope that goes beyond protecting critical infrastructure, such as hospitals and power plants, to all organizations in … | Continue reading
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration will drive the next era of growth, wealth, and human flourishing. It’s a scary metaphor. Throughout American history, the drive for expansion and the very … | Continue reading
In the first week of January, the pharmaceutical giant Merck quietly settled its years-long lawsuit over whether or not its property and casualty insurers would cover a $700 million claim filed after the devastating NotPetya cyberattack in 2017. The malware ultimately infected mo … | Continue reading
Last week, someone posted something like 570 files, images and chat logs from a Chinese company called I-Soon. I-Soon sells hacking and espionage services to Chinese national and local government. Lots of details in the news articles. These aren’t details about the tools or techn … | Continue reading
Apple announced PQ3, its post-quantum encryption standard based on the Kyber secure key-encapsulation protocol, one of the post-quantum algorithms selected by NIST in 2022. There’s a lot of detail in the Apple blog post, and more in Douglas Stabila’s security analysis. I am of tw … | Continue reading
There are correlations between the populations of the Illex Argentines squid and water temperatures. 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
New research: LLM Agents can Autonomously Hack Websites Abstract: In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly capable and can now interact with tools (i.e., call functions), read documents, and recursively call themselves. As a result, these LLMs can no … | Continue reading
Simon Willison has been playing with the video processing capabilities of the new Gemini Pro 1.5 model from Google, and it’s really impressive. Which means a lot of scary new video prompt injection attacks. And remember, given the current state of technology, prompt injection att … | Continue reading
First-person account of someone who fell for a scam, that started as a fake Amazon service rep and ended with a fake CIA agent, and lost $50,000 cash. And this is not a naive or stupid person. The details are fascinating. And if you think it couldn’t happen to you, think again. G … | Continue reading
Microsoft announced that it caught Chinese, Russian, and Iranian hackers using its AI tools—presumably coding tools—to improve their hacking abilities. From their report: In collaboration with OpenAI, we are sharing threat intelligence showing detected state affiliated adversarie … | Continue reading
The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that breaking end-to-end encryption by adding backdoors violates human rights: Seemingly most critically, the [Russian] government told the ECHR that any intrusion on private lives resulting from decrypting messages was “necessary” to … | Continue reading
It uses black beans for color and seaweed for flavor. 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
Good essay on software bloat and the insecurities it causes. The world ships too much code, most of it by third parties, sometimes unintended, most of it uninspected. Because of this, there is a huge attack surface full of mediocre code. Efforts are ongoing to improve the quality … | Continue reading
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at the Munich Security Conference (MSC) 2024 in Munich, Germany, on Friday, February 16, 2024. I’m giving a keynote at a symposium on “AI and Trust” at Generative AI, Free Speech, & Public Discourse. T … | Continue reading
The winner of the Best Paper Award at Crypto this year was a significant improvement to lattice-based cryptanalysis. This is important, because a bunch of NIST’s post-quantum options base their security on lattice problems. I worry about standardizing on post-quantum algorithms t … | Continue reading
The paperback version of A Hacker’s Mind has just been published. It’s the same book, only a cheaper format. But—and this is the real reason I am posting this—Amazon has significantly discounted the hardcover to $15 to get rid of its stock. This is much cheaper than I am selling … | Continue reading
Molly White—of “Web3 is Going Just Great” fame—reviews Chris Dixon’s blockchain solutions book: Read Write Own: In fact, throughout the entire book, Dixon fails to identify a single blockchain project that has successfully provided a non-speculative service at any kind of scale. … | Continue reading
Matt Burgess tries to only use passkeys. The results are mixed. | Continue reading
Amusing story about a penguin named “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. | Continue reading
The widely reported story last week that 1.5 million smart toothbrushes were hacked and used in a DDoS attack is false. Near as I can tell, a German reporter talking to someone at Fortinet got it wrong, and then everyone else ran with it without reading the German text. It was a … | Continue reading
Over on Lawfare, Jim Dempsey published a really interesting proposal for software liability: “Standard for Software Liability: Focus on the Product for Liability, Focus on the Process for Safe Harbor.” Section 1 of this paper sets the stage by briefly describing the problem to be … | Continue reading
Interesting research: “Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training“: Abstract: Humans are capable of strategically deceptive behavior: behaving helpfully in most situations, but then behaving very differently in order to pursue alternative objecti … | Continue reading
A deepfake video conference call—with everyone else on the call a fake—fooled a finance worker into sending $25M to the criminals’ account. | Continue reading
Argentina is reporting that there is a good population of illex squid in its waters ready for fishing, and is working to ensure that Chinese fishing boats don’t take it all. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t c … | Continue reading
David Kahn has died. His groundbreaking book, The Codebreakers was the first serious book I read about codebreaking, and one of the primary reasons I entered this field. He will be missed. | Continue reading
In 2009, I wrote: There are several ways two people can divide a piece of cake in half. One way is to find someone impartial to do it for them. This works, but it requires another person. Another way is for one person to divide the piece, and the other person to complain (to the … | Continue reading
Consumer Reports is reporting that Facebook has built a massive surveillance network: Using a panel of 709 volunteers who shared archives of their Facebook data, Consumer Reports found that a total of 186,892 companies sent data about them to the social network. On average, each … | Continue reading
In October, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) proposed a set of rules that if implemented would transform how financial institutions handle personal data about their customers. The rules put control of that data back in the hands of ordinary Americans, while at the … | Continue reading
GCHQ has released new images of the WWII Colossus code-breaking computer, celebrating the machine’s eightieth anniversary (birthday?). News article. | Continue reading
It finally admitted to buying bulk data on Americans from data brokers, in response to a query by Senator Weyden. This is almost certainly illegal, although the NSA maintains that it is legal until it’s told otherwise. Some news articles. | Continue reading
Microsoft is reporting that a Russian intelligence agency—the same one responsible for SolarWinds—accessed the email system of the company’s executives. Beginning in late November 2023, the threat actor used a password spray attack to compromise a legacy non-production test tenan … | Continue reading
Amazing footage of a black-eyed squid (Gonatus onyx) carrying thousands of eggs. They tend to hang out about 6,200 feet below sea level. 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 guidelin … | Continue reading
For most of history, communicating with a computer has not been like communicating with a person. In their earliest years, computers required carefully constructed instructions, delivered through punch cards; then came a command-line interface, followed by menus and options and t … | Continue reading
Interesting article. I am also skeptical that we are going to see useful quantum computers anytime soon. Since at least 2019, I have been saying that this is hard. And that we don’t know if it’s “land a person on the surface of the moon” hard, or “land a person on the surface of … | Continue reading