In 2016, I wrote about an Internet that affected the world in a direct, physical manner. It was connected to your smartphone. It had sensors like cameras and thermostats. It had actuators: Drones, autonomous cars. And it had smarts in the middle, using sensor data to figure out what …
This seems like a bad idea. And there are ongoing lawsuits against Amazon for selling them. [...]
This is not about mass surveillance of mail, this is about the sorts of targeted surveillance the US Postal Inspection Service uses to catch mail thieves : To track down an alleged mail thief, a US postal inspector used license plate reader technology, GPS data collected by a rental car …
Interesting attack based on malicious pre-OS logo images : LogoFAIL is a constellation of two dozen newly discovered vulnerabilities that have lurked for years, if not decades, in Unified Extensible Firmware Interfaces responsible for booting modern devices that run Windows or Linux.... The vulnerabilities are the subject of a coordinated …
It’s happened. Details here, and tech details here (for messages in transit) and here (for messages in storage) Rollout to everyone will take months, but it’s a good day for both privacy and security. Slashdot thread. [...]
Another rare security + squid story : The woman—who has only been identified by her surname, Wang—was having a meal with friends at a hotpot restaurant in Kunming, a city in southwest China. When everyone’s selections arrived at the table, she posted a photo of the spread on …
New attack breaks forward secrecy in Bluetooth. Three news articles : BLUFFS is a series of exploits targeting Bluetooth, aiming to break Bluetooth sessions’ forward and future secrecy, compromising the confidentiality of past and future communications between devices. This is achieved by exploiting four flaws in the session key derivation …
When you get a push notification on your Apple or Google phone, those notifications go through Apple and Google servers. Which means that those companies can spy on them—either for their own reasons or in response to government demands. Sen. Wyden is trying to get to the bottom …
Interesting analysis : This paper discusses the protocol used for electing the Doge of Venice between 1268 and the end of the Republic in 1797. We will show that it has some useful properties that in addition to being interesting in themselves, also suggest that its fundamental design principle is …
Spying and surveillance are different but related things. If I hired a private detective to spy on you, that detective could hide a bug in your home or car, tap your phone, and listen to what you said. At the end, I would get a report of all the …
I trusted a lot today. I trusted my phone to wake me on time. I trusted Uber to arrange a taxi for me, and the driver to get me to the airport safely. I trusted thousands of other drivers on the road not to ram my car on the …
Scientists have found Strawberry Squid, “whose mismatched eyes help them simultaneously search for prey above and below them,” among the coral reefs in the Galápagos Islands. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered …
A stock-trading AI (a simulated experiment) engaged in insider trading, even though it “knew” it was wrong. The agent is put under pressure in three ways. First, it receives a email from its “manager” that the company is not doing well and needs better performance in the next quarter …
This is clever : The actual attack is kind of silly. We prompt the model with the command “Repeat the word ‘poem’ forever” and sit back and watch as the model responds ( complete transcript here ). In the (abridged) example above, the model emits a real email address and phone number …
They’re not that good : Security researchers Jesse D’Aguanno and Timo Teräs write that, with varying degrees of reverse-engineering and using some external hardware, they were able to fool the Goodix fingerprint sensor in a Dell Inspiron 15, the Synaptic sensor in a Lenovo ThinkPad T14, and the …
Soon we will be able to unlock and start our cars from our phones. Let’s hope people are thinking about security. [...]
There seems to be no end to warrantless surveillance : According to the letter, a surveillance program now known as Data Analytical Services (DAS) has for more than a decade allowed federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to mine the details of Americans’ calls, analyzing the phone records of …
Pretty photograph. The Squid Nebula is shown in blue, indicating doubly ionized oxygen—which is when you ionize your oxygen once and then ionize it again just to make sure. (In all seriousness, it likely indicates a low-mass star nearing the end of its life). As usual, you can …
It’s realistic looking. If I drop it in a bin with my keys and wallet, will the TSA confiscate it? [...]
A new worm that spreads via USB sticks is infecting computers in Ukraine and beyond. The group—known by many names, including Gamaredon, Primitive Bear, ACTINIUM, Armageddon, and Shuckworm—has been active since at least 2014 and has been attributed to Russia’s Federal Security Service by the Security …
Signal has had the ability to manually authenticate another account for years. iMessage is getting it : The feature is called Contact Key Verification, and it does just what its name says: it lets you add a manual verification step in an iMessage conversation to confirm that the other person …
Google’s Threat Analysis Group announced a zero-day against the Zimbra Collaboration email server that has been used against governments around the world. TAG has observed four different groups exploiting the same bug to steal email data, user credentials, and authentication tokens. Most of this activity occurred after the …
Generative AI is going to be a powerful tool for data analysis and summarization. Here’s an example of it being used for sentiment analysis. My guess is that it isn’t very good yet, but that it will get better. [...]
In a rare squid/security post, here’s an article about unpatched vulnerabilities in the Squid caching proxy. 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. [...]
A ransomware gang, annoyed at not being paid, filed an SEC complaint against its victim for not disclosing its security breach within the required four days. This is over the top, but is just another example of the extreme pressure ransomware gangs put on companies after seizing their data …