Author Archives: Bruce Schneier

CVE Program Almost Unfunded

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Mitre’s CVE’s program—which provides common naming and other informational resources about cybersecurity vulnerabilities—was about to be cancelled, as the US Department of Homeland Security failed to renew the contact. It was funded for eleven more months at the last minute.

This is a big deal. The CVE program is one of those pieces of common infrastructure that everyone benefits from. Losing it will bring us back to a world where there’s no single way to talk about vulnerabilities. It’s kind of crazy to think that the US government might damage its own security in this way—but I suppose no crazier than any of the other ways the US is working against its own interests right now…

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China Sort of Admits to Being Behind Volt Typhoon

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The Wall Street Journal has the story:

Chinese officials acknowledged in a secret December meeting that Beijing was behind a widespread series of alarming cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure, according to people familiar with the matter, underscoring how hostilities between the two superpowers are continuing to escalate.

The Chinese delegation linked years of intrusions into computer networks at U.S. ports, water utilities, airports and other targets, to increasing U.S. policy support for Taiwan, the people, who declined to be named, said.

The admission wasn’t explicit:…

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AI Vulnerability Finding

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Microsoft is reporting that its AI systems are able to find new vulnerabilities in source code:

Microsoft discovered eleven vulnerabilities in GRUB2, including integer and buffer overflows in filesystem parsers, command flaws, and a side-channel in cryptographic comparison.

Additionally, 9 buffer overflows in parsing SquashFS, EXT4, CramFS, JFFS2, and symlinks were discovered in U-Boot and Barebox, which require physical access to exploit.

The newly discovered flaws impact devices relying on UEFI Secure Boot, and if the right conditions are met, attackers can bypass security protections to execute arbitrary code on the device…

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Arguing Against CALEA

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At a Congressional hearing earlier this week, Matt Blaze made the point that CALEA, the 1994 law that forces telecoms to make phone calls wiretappable, is outdated in today’s threat environment and should be rethought:

In other words, while the legally-mandated CALEA capability requirements have changed little over the last three decades, the infrastructure that must implement and protect it has changed radically. This has greatly expanded the “attack surface” that must be defended to prevent unauthorized wiretaps, especially at scale. The job of the illegal eavesdropper has gotten significantly easier, with many more options and opportunities for them to exploit. Compromising our telecommunications infrastructure is now little different from performing any other kind of computer intrusion or data breach, a well-known and endemic cybersecurity problem. To put it bluntly, something like Salt Typhoon was inevitable, and will likely happen again unless significant changes are made…

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DIRNSA Fired

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In “Secrets and Lies” (2000), I wrote:

It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state.

It’s something a bunch of us were saying at the time, in reference to the vast NSA’s surveillance capabilities.

I have been thinking of that quote a lot as I read news stories of President Trump firing the Director of the National Security Agency. General Timothy Haugh.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote:

We don’t know what pressure the Trump administration is using to make intelligence services fall into line, but it isn’t crazy to …

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