Showing only posts tagged academic papers. Show all posts.

Using EM Waves to Detect Malware

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I don’t even know what I think about this. Researchers have developed a malware detection system that uses EM waves: “ Obfuscation Revealed: Leveraging Electromagnetic Signals for Obfuscated Malware Classification.” Abstract : The Internet of Things (IoT) is constituted of devices that are exponentially growing in number and in complexity …

Friday Squid Blogging: Deep-Dwelling Squid

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We have discovered a squid — (Oegopsida, Magnapinnidae, Magnapinna sp.) — that lives at 6,000 meters deep. :They’re really weird,” says Vecchione. “They drift along with their arms spread out and these really long, skinny, spaghetti-like extensions dangling down underneath them.” Microscopic suckers on those filaments enable the squid …

Hiding Vulnerabilities in Source Code

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Really interesting research demonstrating how to hide vulnerabilities in source code by manipulating how Unicode text is displayed. It’s really clever, and not the sort of attack one would normally think about. From Ross Anderson’s blog : We have discovered ways of manipulating the encoding of source code …

Security Risks of Client-Side Scanning

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Even before Apple made its announcement, law enforcement shifted their battle for backdoors to client-side scanning. The idea is that they wouldn’t touch the cryptography, but instead eavesdrop on communications and systems before encryption or after decryption. It’s not a cryptographic backdoor, but it’s still a …

Recovering Real Faces from Face-Generation ML System

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New paper: “ This Person (Probably) Exists. Identity Membership Attacks Against GAN Generated Faces. Abstract: Recently, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have achieved stunning realism, fooling even human observers. Indeed, the popular tongue-in-cheek website http://thispersondoesnotexist.com, taunts users with GAN generated images that seem too real to believe. On the …

Using “Master Faces” to Bypass Face-Recognition Authenticating Systems

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Fascinating research: “ Generating Master Faces for Dictionary Attacks with a Network-Assisted Latent Space Evolution.” Abstract: A master face is a face image that passes face-based identity-authentication for a large portion of the population. These faces can be used to impersonate, with a high probability of success, any user, without …

Storing Encrypted Photos in Google’s Cloud

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New paper: “ Encrypted Cloud Photo Storage Using Google Photos “: Abstract: Cloud photo services are widely used for persistent, convenient, and often free photo storage, which is especially useful for mobile devices. As users store more and more photos in the cloud, significant privacy concerns arise because even a single …

Hiding Malware in ML Models

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Interesting research: “EvilModel: Hiding Malware Inside of Neural Network Models”. Abstract: Delivering malware covertly and detection-evadingly is critical to advanced malware campaigns. In this paper, we present a method that delivers malware covertly and detection-evadingly through neural network models. Neural network models are poorly explainable and have a good …

Insurance and Ransomware

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As ransomware becomes more common, I’m seeing more discussions about the ethics of paying the ransom. Here’s one more contribution to that issue: a research paper that the insurance industry is hurting more than it’s helping. However, the most pressing challenge currently facing the industry is …

Intentional Flaw in GPRS Encryption Algorithm GEA-1

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General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) is a mobile data standard that was widely used in the early 2000s. The first encryption algorithm for that standard was GEA-1, a stream cipher built on three linear-feedback shift registers and a non-linear combining function. Although the algorithm has a 64-bit key, the …

Security Analysis of Apple’s “Find My…” Protocol

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Interesting research: “ Who Can Find My Devices? Security and Privacy of Apple’s Crowd-Sourced Bluetooth Location Tracking System “: Abstract: Overnight, Apple has turned its hundreds-of-million-device ecosystem into the world’s largest crowd-sourced location tracking network called offline finding (OF). OF leverages online finder devices to detect the presence of …

Metadata Left in Security Agency PDFs

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Really interesting research : “Exploitation and Sanitization of Hidden Data in PDF Files” Abstract: Organizations publish and share more and more electronic documents like PDF files. Unfortunately, most organizations are unaware that these documents can compromise sensitive information like authors names, details on the information system and architecture. All these …

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