Author Archives: Bruce Schneier

AI Data Poisoning

Posted on by

Cloudflare has a new feature—available to free users as well—that uses AI to generate random pages to feed to AI web crawlers:

Instead of simply blocking bots, Cloudflare’s new system lures them into a “maze” of realistic-looking but irrelevant pages, wasting the crawler’s computing resources. The approach is a notable shift from the standard block-and-defend strategy used by most website protection services. Cloudflare says blocking bots sometimes backfires because it alerts the crawler’s operators that they’ve been detected.

“When we detect unauthorized crawling, rather than blocking the request, we will link to a series of AI-generated pages that are convincing enough to entice a crawler to traverse them,” writes Cloudflare. “But while real looking, this content is not actually the content of the site we are protecting, so the crawler wastes time and resources.”…

Continue reading AI Data Poisoning→

Report on Paragon Spyware

Posted on by

Citizen Lab has a new report on Paragon’s spyware:

Key Findings:

  • Introducing Paragon Solutions. Paragon Solutions was founded in Israel in 2019 and sells spyware called Graphite. The company differentiates itself by claiming it has safeguards to prevent the kinds of spyware abuses that NSO Group and other vendors are notorious for.
  • Infrastructure Analysis of Paragon Spyware. Based on a tip from a collaborator, we mapped out server infrastructure that we attribute to Paragon’s Graphite spyware tool. We identified a subset of suspected Paragon deployments, including in Australia, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Israel, and Singapore.
    …

Continue reading Report on Paragon Spyware→

My Writings Are in the LibGen AI Training Corpus

Posted on by

The Atlantic has a search tool that allows you to search for specific works in the “LibGen” database of copyrighted works that Meta used to train its AI models. (The rest of the article is behind a paywall, but not the search tool.)

It’s impossible to know exactly which parts of LibGen Meta used to train its AI, and which parts it might have decided to exclude; this snapshot was taken in January 2025, after Meta is known to have accessed the database, so some titles here would not have been available to download.

Still…interesting.

Searching my name yields 199 results: all of my books in different versions, plus a bunch of shorter items…

Continue reading My Writings Are in the LibGen AI Training Corpus→

Posted in ai

Critical GitHub Attack

Posted on by

This is serious:

A sophisticated cascading supply chain attack has compromised multiple GitHub Actions, exposing critical CI/CD secrets across tens of thousands of repositories. The attack, which originally targeted the widely used “tj-actions/changed-files” utility, is now believed to have originated from an earlier breach of the “reviewdog/action-setup@v1” GitHub Action, according to a report.

[…]

CISA confirmed the vulnerability has been patched in version 46.0.1.

Given that the utility is used by more than 23,000 GitHub repositories, the scale of potential impact has raised significant alarm throughout the developer community…

Continue reading Critical GitHub Attack→

Posted in Uncategorized

Is Security Human Factors Research Skewed Towards Western Ideas and Habits?

Posted on by

Really interesting research: “How WEIRD is Usable Privacy and Security Research?” by Ayako A. Hasegawa Daisuke Inoue, and Mitsuaki Akiyama:

Abstract: In human factor fields such as human-computer interaction (HCI) and psychology, researchers have been concerned that participants mostly come from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) countries. This WEIRD skew may hinder understanding of diverse populations and their cultural differences. The usable privacy and security (UPS) field has inherited many research methodologies from research on human factor fields. We conducted a literature review to understand the extent to which participant samples in UPS papers were from WEIRD countries and the characteristics of the methodologies and research topics in each user study recruiting Western or non-Western participants. We found that the skew toward WEIRD countries in UPS is greater than that in HCI. Geographic and linguistic barriers in the study methods and recruitment methods may cause researchers to conduct user studies locally. In addition, many papers did not report participant demographics, which could hinder the replication of the reported studies, leading to low reproducibility. To improve geographic diversity, we provide the suggestions including facilitate replication studies, address geographic and linguistic issues of study/recruitment methods, and facilitate research on the topics for non-WEIRD populations…

Continue reading Is Security Human Factors Research Skewed Towards Western Ideas and Habits?→

Improvements in Brute Force Attacks

Posted on by

New paper: “GPU Assisted Brute Force Cryptanalysis of GPRS, GSM, RFID, and TETRA: Brute Force Cryptanalysis of KASUMI, SPECK, and TEA3.”

Abstract: Key lengths in symmetric cryptography are determined with respect to the brute force attacks with current technology. While nowadays at least 128-bit keys are recommended, there are many standards and real-world applications that use shorter keys. In order to estimate the actual threat imposed by using those short keys, precise estimates for attacks are crucial.

In this work we provide optimized implementations of several widely used algorithms on GPUs, leading to interesting insights on the cost of brute force attacks on several real-word applications…

Continue reading Improvements in Brute Force Attacks→