Not everything needs to be digital and “smart.” License plates, for example : Josep Rodriguez, a researcher at security firm IOActive, has revealed a technique to “jailbreak” digital license plates sold by Reviver, the leading vendor of those plates in the US with 65,000 plates already sold. By removing …
Starting next year : Our longstanding offering won’t fundamentally change next year, but we are going to introduce a new offering that’s a big shift from anything we’ve done before—short-lived certificates. Specifically, certificates with a lifetime of six days. This is a big upgrade for the …
Good survey paper. Blog moderation policy. [...]
Last week, we saw a supply-chain attack against the Ultralytics AI library on GitHub. A quick summary : On December 4, a malicious version 8.3.41 of the popular AI library ultralytics —which has almost 60 million downloads—was published to the Python Package Index (PyPI) package repository. The …
Surprising no one, it’s easy to trick an LLM-controlled robot into ignoring its safety instructions. [...]
This is going to be interesting. It’s a video of someone trying on a variety of printed full-face masks. They won’t fool anyone for long, but will survive casual scrutiny. And they’re cheap and easy to swap. [...]
For a technology that seems startling in its modernity, AI sure has a long history. Google Translate, OpenAI chatbots, and Meta AI image generators are built on decades of advancements in linguistics, signal processing, statistics, and other fields going back to the early days of computing—and, often, on …
Fifteen years ago I blogged about a different SQUID. Here’s an update : Fleeing drivers are a common problem for law enforcement. They just won’t stop unless persuaded—persuaded by bullets, barriers, spikes, or snares. Each option is risky business. Shooting up a fugitive’s car is one …
This tool seems to do a pretty good job. The company’s Mobile Threat Hunting feature uses a combination of malware signature-based detection, heuristics, and machine learning to look for anomalies in iOS and Android device activity or telltale signs of spyware infection. For paying iVerify customers, the tool …
In 2025, AI is poised to change every aspect of democratic politics —but it won’t necessarily be for the worse. India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, has used AI to translate his speeches for his multilingual electorate in real time, demonstrating how AI can help diverse democracies to …
I recently wrote about the new iOS feature that forces an iPhone to reboot after it’s been inactive for a longish period of time. Here are the technical details, discovered through reverse engineering. The feature triggers after seventy-two hours of inactivity, even it is remains connected to Wi-Fi …
Interesting research : Using jet propulsion inspired by squid, researchers demonstrate a microjet system that delivers medications directly into tissues, matching the effectiveness of traditional needles. Blog moderation policy. [...]
These are two attacks against the system components surrounding LLMs: We propose that LLM Flowbreaking, following jailbreaking and prompt injection, joins as the third on the growing list of LLM attack types. Flowbreaking is less about whether prompt or response guardrails can be bypassed, and more about whether user …
The Israeli company NSO Group sells Pegasus spyware to countries around the world (including countries like Saudi Arabia, UAE, India, Mexico, Morocco and Rwanda). We assumed that those countries use the spyware themselves. Now we’ve learned that that’s not true: that NSO Group employees operate the spyware …
This is from 404 Media : The Graykey, a phone unlocking and forensics tool that is used by law enforcement around the world, is only able to retrieve partial data from all modern iPhones that run iOS 18 or iOS 18.0.1, which are two recently released versions of …
Interesting analysis: An Internet Voting System Fatally Flawed in Creative New Ways. Abstract: The recently published “MERGE” protocol is designed to be used in the prototype CAC-vote system. The voting kiosk and protocol transmit votes over the internet and then transmit voter-verifiable paper ballots through the mail. In the …
Lots of details that are beyond me. Blog moderation policy. [...]
Interesting analysis : We introduce and explore a little-known threat to digital equality and freedomwebsites geoblocking users in response to political risks from sanctions. U.S. policy prioritizes internet freedom and access to information in repressive regimes. Clarifying distinctions between free and paid websites, allowing trunk cables to repressive …
This feels important : The Secret Service has used a technology called Locate X which uses location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on phones. Because users agreed to an opaque terms of service page, the Secret Service believes it doesn’t need a warrant. [...]
Steve Bellovin is retiring. Here’s his retirement talk, reflecting on his career and what the cybersecurity field needs next. [...]
Interesting analysis : Although much attention is given to sophisticated, zero-click spyware developed by companies like Israel’s NSO Group, the Italian spyware marketplace has been able to operate relatively under the radar by specializing in cheaper tools. According to an Italian Ministry of Justice document, as of December 2022 …
Zero-day vulnerabilities are more commonly used, according to the Five Eyes: Key Findings In 2023, malicious cyber actors exploited more zero-day vulnerabilities to compromise enterprise networks compared to 2022, allowing them to conduct cyber operations against higher-priority targets. In 2023, the majority of the most frequently exploited vulnerabilities were …
Fantastic video of a female Gonatus onyx squid swimming while carrying her egg sack. An earlier related post. Blog moderation policy. [...]
Stuart Schechter makes some good points on the history of bad password policies: Morris and Thompson’s work brought much-needed data to highlight a problem that lots of people suspected was bad, but that had not been studied scientifically. Their work was a big step forward, if not for …
Everybody is reporting about a new security iPhone security feature with iOS 18: if the phone hasn’t been used for a few days, it automatically goes into its “Before First Unlock” state and has to be rebooted. This is a really good security feature. But various police departments …