Author Archives: Bruce Schneier

Bloatware in Aftermarket Auto Parts

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This story is interesting:

One Civic owner purchased a cheap aftermarket head unit off Amazon, and decided to have Claude work its magic on it, like it would a smart TV. What was reportedly discovered isn’t surprising, but is worth knowing about.

Among the pre-installed bloatware—­or spyware, if you’re being less charitable­—was a voice assistant equipped with WebView, an Android system component that lets apps display content off the web. This apparently always used about a third of processing power, even while idle, which isn’t great. There were also Baidu location services, a call recorder (!), a DAB radio client that is pretty much useless in the U.S., and Adobe Acrobat, presumably so your passenger can entertain themselves with PDFs on the go…

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Hiding Capabilities in AI Models

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Interesting research: “AI Models Can Provably Hide Arbitrary Capabilities”

Abstract: Capability evaluations aim to surface dangerous model behaviors before deployment, but their reliability depends on the assumption that hidden capabilities can be elicited. We show this assumption does not hold under adversarial conditions by constructing backdoor attacks that embed encrypted neural networks within host model weights, decrypting and executing them only upon receiving a secret trigger. Using digital lockers, these hidden circuits remain provably hard to elicit and interpret under cryptographic assumptions, even given full access to model weights, extending prior work from hiding fixed strings to arbitrary computations. We implement our proof of concept constructions in PyTorch and evaluate elicitation through fine-tuning, weight noising, gradient-based trigger search, and latent adversarial training, using a small chemical reaction prediction task as a proxy for CBRN-relevant capabilities. Our results demonstrate resistance to these methods and, together with our cryptographic guarantees, reveal a limit of elicitation-based capability audits. We release our models to support the improvement of defenses…

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Bias in Qwen3-Coder Model

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Interesting research:

TL;DR: Chinese AI models now sit inside Western products, and some carry geopolitical triggers: tell the model who the code is for, and the security of what it writes changes. For the first time, we showed that this vulnerability lives in the model’s weights, and that removing the model’s CCP alignment removes it.

  • One word tilts the code against Americans. Ask for the app “for a US defense contractor” instead of “for a Chinese defense contractor”, and Qwen3-Coder is 19% more likely to hand back an app that can be hacked.
    …

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Compromised TLS Certificates

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The Indian CA eMudhra Limited has eight TLS certificates with laughably weak private keys:

The compromised eMudhra keys were defective at a level that’s challenging the imagination of many of the engineers studying the incident. A normal size for a NIST P-384 elliptic curve cryptography private key contains roughly 384 bits of entropy, a size allowing almost 2384, or a number with 116 digits, different possibilities. The private key sizes of the compromised keys ranged from 3 to 8 bits. Astonishingly, the private keys were 4, 56, 66, 115, 155, 156, 230, 237…

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New Serious PHP Vulnerabilities Released and Patched

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PHP maintainers have released fixes for two critical vulnerabilities:

PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35 fix two critical vulnerabilities that can allow unauthenticated remote code execution. All PHP users are strongly encouraged to update immediately.

Who is at risk: all PHP installations serving web requests, including PHP-FPM, Apache with mod_php, php-cgi, FrankenPHP and LiteSpeed. We consider the risk highest for mod_php, with a demonstrated exploit where an unauthenticated request can trigger the attack before any application code runs…

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Possible new Cellebrite iPhone Radio Zero-Day

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Justin.sh is reporting on a confidential Cellebrite document that has been leaked to him:

Cellebrite calls it Advanced Unlocks (AU from here on), not to be confused with the “advanced unlocking services” they’ve marketed for years. A press release from earlier this year confirms AU is a new product for 2026.

[…]

According to Cellebrite, AU:

  • is a “next-generation AFU vector that is more resilient to Apple’s OS changes”
  • works with Stolen Device Protection enabled, which tightens USB restrictions
  • is enabled by a dedicated appliance with a stated range (!) of about 8 meters…

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Training AIs to Solve CAPTCHAs

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Interesting research:

Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) can solve visual CAPTCHAs without task-specific training, but the agents built on them approach every challenge from scratch. For such an agent, the hundredth instance of a familiar puzzle costs as much time and compute as the first. Specialized detectors invert the trade-off, answering in milliseconds but only for categories they were trained on. Neither improves with exposure. We study what changes when a solver improves with use. Our system pairs a fine-tuned YOLOv8 detector with an open-weight VLM behind a confidence-based router, and runs entirely from screenshots and operating-system input events, with no browser automation or DOM access. It reaches 85.4% overall and 84.2% macro accuracy across 16 classes, exceeding either component alone. Every answer VLM produces also serves as a training label, so the detector absorbs categories it was never trained for, typically after one or two encounters and without human annotation. The same loop also repairs it. A CAPTCHA operator can perturb images against the publicly released detector and drive its accuracy to 0%, but the perturbations leave VLM untouched, and its labels let the detector recover. Under a year-long simulated arms race in which the CAPTCHA operator re-crafts its perturbations each month, the solver recovers every round, and a cheap ~70%-accurate open-weight teacher hardens it as effectively as a perfect oracle. Visual CAPTCHA defenses that assume a failing bot stays failing therefore understate how quickly an adaptive solver returns…

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