New paper: “ Zero Progress on Zero Days: How the Last Ten Years Created the Modern Spyware Market “: Abstract: Spyware makes surveillance simple. The last ten years have seen a global market emerge for ready-made software that lets governments surveil their citizens and foreign adversaries alike and to do so …

This is another attack that convinces the AI to ignore road signs : Due to the way CMOS cameras operate, rapidly changing light from fast flashing diodes can be used to vary the color. For example, the shade of red on a stop sign could look different on each line …

Law professor Dan Solove has a new article on privacy regulation. In his email to me, he writes: “I’ve been pondering privacy consent for more than a decade, and I think I finally made a breakthrough with this article.” His mini-abstract: In this Article I argue that most …

The debate over professionalizing software engineers is decades old. (The basic idea is that, like lawyers and architects, there should be some professional licensing requirement for software engineers.) Here’s a law journal article recommending the same idea for AI engineers. This Article proposes another way: professionalizing AI engineering …

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. [...]

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 instruction attack,” as …

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 generation (RAG), a way for LLMs to pull in extra data from …

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 degree of preservation of this squid is …

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 two minds about …

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 now function autonomously as agents. With the …

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 too quickly. We are still learning a …

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 solved. Section 2 canvasses …

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 objectives when given the opportunity. If an AI system learned such a deceptive strategy …

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 …

New research into poisoning AI models : The researchers first trained the AI models using supervised learning and then used additional “safety training” methods, including more supervised learning, reinforcement learning, and adversarial training. After this, they checked if the AI still had hidden behaviors. They found that with specific prompts …

Really interesting research: “ Lend Me Your Ear: Passive Remote Physical Side Channels on PCs.” Abstract: We show that built-in sensors in commodity PCs, such as microphones, inadvertently capture electromagnetic side-channel leakage from ongoing computation. Moreover, this information is often conveyed by supposedly-benign channels such as audio recordings and common …

Interesting research: “ Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants? “: Abstract: We conduct the first large-scale user study examining how users interact with an AI Code assistant to solve a variety of security related tasks across different programming languages. Overall, we find that participants who had access to …

New research demonstrates voice cloning, in multiple languages, using samples ranging from one to twelve seconds. Research paper. [...]

New law journal article : Smart Device Manufacturer Liability and Redress for Third-Party Cyberattack Victims Abstract: Smart devices are used to facilitate cyberattacks against both their users and third parties. While users are generally able to seek redress following a cyberattack via data protection legislation, there is no equivalent pathway …

We don’t have a useful quantum computer yet, but we do have quantum algorithms. Shor’s algorithm has the potential to factor large numbers faster than otherwise possible, which—if the run times are actually feasible—could break both the RSA and Diffie-Hellman public-key algorithms. Now, computer scientist …

TikTok seems to be skewing things in the interests of the Chinese Communist Party. (This is a serious analysis, and the methodology looks sound.) Conclusion: Substantial Differences in Hashtag Ratios Raise Concerns about TikTok’s Impartiality Given the research above, we assess a strong possibility that content on TikTok …