Stuart Schechter makes some good points on the history of bad password policies: Morris and Thompson’s work brought much-needed data to highlight a problem that lots of people suspected was bad, but that had not been studied scientifically. Their work was a big step forward, if not for …

In this post, I’ll collect links on Apple’s iPhone backdoor for scanning CSAM images. Previous links are here and here. Apple says that hash collisions in its CSAM detection system were expected, and not a concern. I’m not convinced that this secondary system was originally part …

Apple’s NeuralHash algorithm — the one it’s using for client-side scanning on the iPhone — has been reverse-engineered. Turns out it was already in iOS 14.3, and someone noticed : Early tests show that it can tolerate image resizing and compression, but not cropping or rotations. We also have …

Andrew Appel and Susan Greenhalgh have a blog post on the insecurity of ES&S’s software authentication system: It turns out that ES&S has bugs in their hash-code checker: if the “reference hashcode” is completely missing, then it’ll say “yes, boss, everything is fine” instead of …