Bluesky thread. Here’s the paper, from 1957. Note reference 3. [...]

Today’s freaky LLM behavior : We study subliminal learning, a surprising phenomenon where language models learn traits from model-generated data that is semantically unrelated to those traits. For example, a “student” model learns to prefer owls when trained on sequences of numbers generated by a “teacher” model that prefers …

Law journal article that looks at the Dual_EC_PRNG backdoor from a US constitutional perspective: Abstract : The National Security Agency (NSA) reportedly paid and pressured technology companies to trick their customers into using vulnerable encryption products. This Article examines whether any of three theories removed the Fourth Amendment’s requirement …

Scientists can manipulate air bubbles trapped in ice to encode messages. [...]

This seems like an important advance in LLM security against prompt injection: Google DeepMind has unveiled CaMeL (CApabilities for MachinE Learning), a new approach to stopping prompt-injection attacks that abandons the failed strategy of having AI models police themselves. Instead, CaMeL treats language models as fundamentally untrusted components within …

Interesting research: “ Guillotine: Hypervisors for Isolating Malicious AIs.” Abstract :As AI models become more embedded in critical sectors like finance, healthcare, and the military, their inscrutable behavior poses ever-greater risks to society. To mitigate this risk, we propose Guillotine, a hypervisor architecture for sandboxing powerful AI models—models that …

This is a truly fascinating paper: “ Trusted Machine Learning Models Unlock Private Inference for Problems Currently Infeasible with Cryptography.” The basic idea is that AIs can act as trusted third parties: Abstract: We often interact with untrusted parties. Prioritization of privacy can limit the effectiveness of these interactions, as …

New research : An associate professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Northeastern University, Deravi’s recently published paper in the Journal of Materials Chemistry C sheds new light on how squid use organs that essentially function as organic solar cells to help power their camouflage abilities. As usual, you …

Really interesting research: “ How WEIRD is Usable Privacy and Security Research? ” by Ayako A. Hasegawa Daisuke Inoue, and Mitsuaki Akiyama: Abstract : In human factor fields such as human-computer interaction (HCI) and psychology, researchers have been concerned that participants mostly come from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) countries …

New paper: “ GPU Assisted Brute Force Cryptanalysis of GPRS, GSM, RFID, and TETRA: Brute Force Cryptanalysis of KASUMI, SPECK, and TEA3.” Abstract: Key lengths in symmetric cryptography are determined with respect to the brute force attacks with current technology. While nowadays at least 128-bit keys are recommended, there are …

Interesting research: “ Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs “: Abstract: We present a surprising result regarding LLMs and alignment. In our experiment, a model is finetuned to output insecure code without disclosing this to the user. The resulting model acts misaligned on a broad range of prompts …

These researchers had LLMs play chess against better opponents. When they couldn’t win, they sometimes resorted to cheating. Researchers gave the models a seemingly impossible task: to win against Stockfish, which is one of the strongest chess engines in the world and a much better player than any …

Interesting research: “ How to Securely Implement Cryptography in Deep Neural Networks.” Abstract: The wide adoption of deep neural networks (DNNs) raises the question of how can we equip them with a desired cryptographic functionality (e.g, to decrypt an encrypted input, to verify that this input is authorized, or …

Really good—and detailed— survey of Trusted Encryption Environments (TEEs.) [...]

Really good—and detailed— survey of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs.) [...]

News : A sponge made of cotton and squid bone that has absorbed about 99.9% of microplastics in water samples in China could provide an elusive answer to ubiquitous microplastic pollution in water across the globe, a new report suggests. [...] The study tested the material in an irrigation ditch …