Customers are finding several advantages to using generative AI within their applications. However, using generative AI adds new considerations when reviewing the threat model of an application, whether you’re using it to improve the customer experience for operational efficiency, to generate more tailored or specific results, or for …

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Officials in Ireland have fined Meta $101 million for storing hundreds of millions of user passwords in plaintext and making them broadly available to company employees. Meta disclosed the lapse in early 2019. The company said that apps for connecting to various Meta-owned social networks …

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the federal body that sets technology standards for governmental agencies, standards organizations, and private companies, has proposed barring some of the most vexing and nonsensical password requirements. Chief among them: mandatory resets, required or restricted use of …

New attack against the RADIUS authentication protocol: The Blast-RADIUS attack allows a man-in-the-middle attacker between the RADIUS client and server to forge a valid protocol accept message in response to a failed authentication request. This forgery could give the attacker access to network devices and services without the attacker …

When an identity provider (IdP) serves multiple service providers (SPs), IdP-initiated single sign-on provides a consistent sign-in experience that allows users to start the authentication process from one centralized portal or dashboard. It helps administrators have more control over the authentication process and simplifies the management. However, when you …

While traditional channels like email and SMS remain important, businesses are increasingly exploring alternative messaging services to reach their customers more effectively. In recent years, WhatsApp has emerged as a simple and effective way to engage with users. According to statista, as of 2024, WhatsApp is the most popular …

Enlarge / Terrapin is coming for your data. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images) Sometime around the start of 1995, an unknown person planted a password sniffer on the network backbone of Finland’s Helsinki University of Technology (now known as Aalto University). Once in place, this piece of dedicated hardware …

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 …

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 …

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 …

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Roles Anywhere enables workloads that run outside of Amazon Web Services (AWS), such as servers, containers, and applications, to use X.509 digital certificates to obtain temporary AWS credentials and access AWS resources, the same way that you use IAM roles for workloads …

The Guardian is reporting about microchips in wheels of Parmesan cheese as an anti-forgery measure. [...]

A bunch of networks, including US Government networks, have been hacked by the Chinese. The hackers used forged authentication tokens to access user email, using a stolen Microsoft Azure account consumer signing key. Congress wants answers. The phrase “ negligent security practices ” is being tossed about—and with good reason …

It’s neither hard nor expensive : Unlike password authentication, which requires a direct match between what is inputted and what’s stored in a database, fingerprint authentication determines a match using a reference threshold. As a result, a successful fingerprint brute-force attack requires only that an inputted image provides …

Jenny Blessing and Ross Anderson have evaluated the security of systems designed to allow the various Internet messaging platforms to interoperate with each other: The Digital Markets Act ruled that users on different platforms should be able to exchange messages with each other. This opens up a real Pandora …

A reporter used an AI synthesis of his own voice to fool the voice authentication system for Lloyd’s Bank. [...]

Some web applications need to protect their authentication tokens or session IDs from cross-site scripting (XSS). It’s an Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) best practice for session management to store secrets in the browsers’ cookie store with the HttpOnly attribute enabled. When cookies have the HttpOnly attribute …

A group of Swiss researchers have published an impressive security analysis of Threema. We provide an extensive cryptographic analysis of Threema, a Swiss-based encrypted messaging application with more than 10 million users and 7000 corporate customers. We present seven different attacks against the protocol in three different threat models …

In the telecommunications industry, sensitive authentication and user data are typically received through mobile voice and keypads, and companies are responsible for protecting the data obtained through these channels. The increasing use of voice-driven interactive voice response (IVR) has resulted in a need to provide solutions that can protect …

This is a really interesting paper that discusses what the authors call the Decoupling Principle: The idea is simple, yet previously not clearly articulated: to ensure privacy, information should be divided architecturally and institutionally such that each entity has only the information they need to perform their relevant function …

This is an actual CAPTCHA I was shown when trying to log into PayPal. As an actual human and not a bot, I had no idea how to answer. Is this a joke? (Seems not.) Is it a Magritte-like existential question? (It’s not a bicycle. It’s a …

Twitter is having intermittent problems with its two-factor authentication system: Not all users are having problems receiving SMS authentication codes, and those who rely on an authenticator app or physical authentication token to secure their Twitter account may not have reason to test the mechanism. But users have been …

CISA is now pushing phishing-resistant multifactor authentication. Roger Grimes has an excellent post reminding everyone that “phishing-resistant” is not “phishing proof,” and that everyone needs to stop pretending otherwise. His list of different attacks is particularly useful. [...]

Here’s a phishing campaign that uses a man-in-the-middle attack to defeat multi-factor authentication: Microsoft observed a campaign that inserted an attacker-controlled proxy site between the account users and the work server they attempted to log into. When the user entered a password into the proxy site, the proxy …

Since the broad launch of our multi-factor authentication (MFA) security key program, customers have been enthusiastic about the program and how they will use it to improve their organizations’ security posture. Given the level of interest, we’re expanding eligibility for the program to allow more US-based AWS account …