Collaborate Disseminate
First-person account of someone accidentally catching several Humboldt squid on a fishing line. No photos, though.
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 p… Continue reading Friday Squid Blogging: Catching Humboldt Squid
I just heard about this:
There’s a travel scam warning going around the internet right now: You should keep your baggage tags on your bags until you get home, then shred them, because scammers are using luggage tags to file fraudulent claims for missing baggage with the airline.
First, the scam is possible. I had a bag destroyed by baggage handlers on a recent flight, and all the information I needed to file a claim was on my luggage tag. I have no idea if I will successfully get any money from the airline, or what form it will be in, or how it will be tied to my name, but at least the first step is possible…
The US Director of National Intelligence is reporting that the UK government is dropping its backdoor mandate against the Apple iPhone. For now, at least, assuming that Tulsi Gabbard is reporting this accurately.
Continue reading The UK May Be Dropping Its Backdoor Mandate
Nice indirect prompt injection attack:
Bargury’s attack starts with a poisoned document, which is shared to a potential victim’s Google Drive. (Bargury says a victim could have also uploaded a compromised file to their own account.) It looks like an official document on company meeting policies. But inside the document, Bargury hid a 300-word malicious prompt that contains instructions for ChatGPT. The prompt is written in white text in a size-one font, something that a human is unlikely to see but a machine will still read.
Continue reading We Are Still Unable to Secure LLMs from Malicious Inputs
I wrote about this in 2023. Here’s the story:
Three Dutch security analysts discovered the vulnerabilities—five in total—in a European radio standard called TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio), which is used in radios made by Motorola, Damm, Hytera, and others. The standard has been used in radios since the ’90s, but the flaws remained unknown because encryption algorithms used in TETRA were kept secret until now.
There’s new news:
In 2023, Carlo Meijer, Wouter Bokslag, and Jos Wetzels of security firm Midnight Blue, based in the Netherlands, discovered vulnerabilities in encryption algorithms that are part of a European radio standard created by ETSI called TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio), which has been baked into radio systems made by Motorola, Damm, Sepura, and others since the ’90s. The flaws remained unknown publicly until their disclosure, because ETSI refused for decades to let anyone examine the proprietary algorithms…
Continue reading Encryption Backdoor in Military/Police Radios
Look at this: McDonald’s chose the password “123456” for a major corporate system.
Continue reading Poor Password Choices
Nice short article on the bobtail squid.
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.
Continue reading Friday Squid Blogging: Bobtail Squid
This academic year, I am taking a sabbatical from the Kennedy School and Harvard University. (It’s not a real sabbatical—I’m just an adjunct—but it’s the same idea.) I will be spending the Fall 2025 and Spring 2026 semesters at the Munk School at the University of Toronto.
I will be organizing a reading group on AI security in the fall. I will be teaching my cybersecurity policy class in the Spring. I will be working with Citizen Lab, the Law School, and the Schwartz Reisman Institute. And I will be enjoying all the multicultural offerings of Toronto…
Think of the Web as a digital territory with its own social contract. In 2014, Tim Berners-Lee called for a “Magna Carta for the Web” to restore the balance of power between individuals and institutions. This mirrors the original charter’s purpose: ensuring that those who occupy a territory have a meaningful stake in its governance.
Web 3.0—the distributed, decentralized Web of tomorrow—is finally poised to change the Internet’s dynamic by returning ownership to data creators. This will change many things about what’s often described as the “CIA triad” of …
Well, this is interesting:
The auction, which will include other items related to cryptology, will be held Nov. 20. RR Auction, the company arranging the sale, estimates a winning bid between $300,000 and $500,000.
Along with the original handwritten plain text of K4 and other papers related to the coding, Mr. Sanborn will also be providing a 12-by-18-inch copper plate that has three lines of alphabetic characters cut through with a jigsaw, which he calls “my proof-of-concept piece” and which he kept on a table for inspiration during the two years he and helpers hand-cut the letters for the project. The process was grueling, exacting and nerve wracking. “You could not make any mistake with 1,800 letters,” he said. “It could not be repaired.”…
Continue reading Jim Sanborn Is Auctioning Off the Solution to Part Four of the Kryptos Sculpture