This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared in The Guardian. In July, Hugging Face, a company that hosts much of the world’s AI software and open-source AI models, was hacked. A malicious dataset had been used to run code on one of its servers. Whoever …
Microsoft’s Secure Boot has had a serious vulnerability for most of its existence. An industry-wide standard Microsoft invented to protect Windows, and later Linux, devices from firmware infections has been trivial to bypass for 13 of its 14 years of existence. The discovery was made by researchers at …
There’s new benchmark measuring AI’s ability to perform mathematical cryptanalysis. Anthropic’s frontier model actually found new attacks. The benchmark: “ CryptanalysisBench: Can LLMs do Cryptanalysis? ” The idea is to benchmark the ability of LLMs to discover new mathematical cryptanalytic attacks against a series of historical algorithms. Abstract …
Governments are switching, but I’m not sure it makes a difference :...some municipalities, including Denver, Colorado, are ditching their Flock arrays. But keep in mind that if they’re only switching from Flock to another brand of license-plate readers, like Axon, it’s like a gambling addict trying …
Yet another Israeli mass surveillance company : Made by Israeli surveillance company Cognyte, the tech simulates a mobile phone tower, which forces nearby phones to connect to it. That enables cops to keep tabs on any phones in the vicinity whether they’re owned by a suspect in a case …
Lower catch this year. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Blog moderation policy. [...]
This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared in IEEE Spectrum. Major benchmarks measure what AI can do. None measure whether it does what you mean: the distance between what you ask an AI to do and the unspoken assumptions about how you want the AI to …
New paper: “ Encryption and Globalization 15 Years Later: End-to-End Encryption and the Third Round of the ‘Going Dark’ Debate “: Abstract : This Article updates and expands on 2012 research on encryption and globalization, analyzing what the authors call “Round 3” of the Going Dark Debate: the current controversies over end-to-end …
Harrowing story of an identity theft victim. Yes, the person made a mistake—they gave the scammer a two-factor authentication code that allowed the scammer to take over their email address. But the real story here is how, for many of us, the security of most of our accounts …
It’s a lot : According to information obtained by The Tech, MIT is spending over $3 million on more than 500 AI surveillance cameras in academic buildings, residence halls, and outdoor areas along Memorial Drive. Installation of the new cameras, along with the wiring and infrastructure that will support …
A recent story of a writer who was mistakenly identified, tracked, and arrested using data from Flock cameras has gone viral. The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. But when the police report was created and …
Lots of articles about this. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Blog moderation policy. [...]
Really interesting piece of cryptographic history : In November 2023, a large cache of his wartime papers—nicknamed the “Bayley papers”—was auctioned in London for almost half a million U.S. dollars. The previously unknown cache contains many sheets in Turing’s own handwriting, telling of his top-secret “Delilah …
Daniel Solove argues in the Wall Street Journal (alternate link ) that giving people control of their personal data is not an effective way to regulate privacy in this era. Instead, we need to hold companies accountable for their actions, similar to what we do with food and drug companies …
Amazing : Researchers from ETH Zurich in Switzerland, however, managed to create a new type of pixel that can simultaneously do both. This hypercharged pixel, called a Fourier pixel, can generate and sense arbitrary light fields and tap into a pixel’s full potential for carrying information by manipulating light …
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking (virtually) at the Policy-Relevant Privacy Research Workshop in Calgary, Canada, on Monday, July 20, 2026. I’m speaking at Boston Leadership Exchange in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, on Wednesday, July 22, 2026. I …
FIFA’s network was vulnerable to anyone with even minimal access. [...]
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Guardian. Opposition to AI data centers has emerged as a primary theme in US politics, one that—surprisingly—doesn’t fall along party lines. We applaud people coming together for constructive debate on any issue, and …
In a rare combined cybersecurity/squid post, a twenty-nine-year-old squid proxy bug can leak HTTP requests. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Blog moderation policy. [...]
In the near future, AI -powered surveillance systems will be able to track everything we do in public, and much of what we do in private. And if we do something wrong—shoplift, litter, jaywalk, you name it—the system will notice, retain it, tie it to your official …
Because of the way they are trained, large language models capture only a slice of human language. They’re trained on the written word, from textbooks to social media posts, and our speech as captured in movies and on television. These models have minimal access to the unscripted conversations …
Last week, national security agencies from the Five Eyes—that’s the rich, English-language-speaking countries club—jointly released a statement warning of the increasing cyber risks of AI models: in particular, their ability to autonomously hack into systems and networks. The statement was more measured than some of the …
Not sure this will have any effect, but I support the effort: According to Google’s legal filing, Outsider Enterprise operates through Telegram. The group offers phishing-as-a-service to individuals who may not be technically savvy enough to set up fraudulent websites and text campaigns on their own. In its …
France is accelerating its transition to post-quantum encryption: France’s cybersecurity agency ANSSI said on Tuesday it would stop certifying security products that lack quantum-resistant encryption, a move that will force government bodies and critical operators to shift away from older systems. Samih Souissi, ANSSI’s chief of staff …
This is from a 2024 company presentation : Officers can also tap into data showing a car’s decals, bumper stickers, back and top racks—along with temporary and unique state tags. Flock calls it a “Vehicle Fingerprint” and it’s touted as a way for law enforcement officials to …