Paul Nakasone Joins OpenAI’s Board of Directors
Former NSA Director Paul Nakasone has joined the board of OpenAI.
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Author Archives: Bruce Schneier
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Nebula
Beautiful astronomical photo.
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Ross Anderson’s Memorial Service
The memorial service for Ross Anderson will be held on Saturday, at 2:00 PM BST. People can attend remotely on Zoom. (The passcode is “L3954FrrEF”.)
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Recovering Public Keys from Signatures
Interesting summary of various ways to derive the public key from digitally signed files.
Normally, with a signature scheme, you have the public key and want to know whether a given signature is valid. But what if we instead have a message and a signat… Continue reading Recovering Public Keys from Signatures
New Blog Moderation Policy
There has been a lot of toxicity in the comments section of this blog. Recently, we’re having to delete more and more comments. Not just spam and off-topic comments, but also sniping and personal attacks. It’s gotten so bad that I need to do something.
My options are limited because I’m just one person, and this website is free, ad-free, and anonymous. I pay for a part-time moderator out of pocket; he isn’t able to constantly monitor comments. And I’m unwilling to require verified accounts.
So starting now, we will be pre-screening comments and letting through only those that 1) are on topic, 2) contribute to the discussion, and 3) don’t attack or insult anyone. The standard is not going to be “well, I guess this doesn’t technically quite break a rule,” but “is this actually contributing.”…
The Hacking of Culture and the Creation of Socio-Technical Debt
Culture is increasingly mediated through algorithms. These algorithms have splintered the organization of culture, a result of states and tech companies vying for influence over mass audiences. One byproduct of this splintering is a shift from imperfect but broad cultural narratives to a proliferation of niche groups, who are defined by ideology or aesthetics instead of nationality or geography. This change reflects a material shift in the relationship between collective identity and power, and illustrates how states no longer have exclusive domain over either. Today, both power and culture are increasingly corporate…
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Rethinking Democracy for the Age of AI
There is a lot written about technology’s threats to democracy. Polarization. Artificial intelligence. The concentration of wealth and power. I have a more general story: The political and economic systems of governance that were created in the mid-18th century are poorly suited for the 21st century. They don’t align incentives well. And they are being hacked too effectively.
At the same time, the cost of these hacked systems has never been greater, across all human history. We have become too powerful as a species. And our systems cannot keep up with fast-changing disruptive technologies…
Using LLMs to Exploit Vulnerabilities
Interesting research: “Teams of LLM Agents can Exploit Zero-Day Vulnerabilities.”
Abstract: LLM agents have become increasingly sophisticated, especially in the realm of cybersecurity. Researchers have shown that LLM agents can exploit real-world vulnerabilities when given a description of the vulnerability and toy capture-the-flag problems. However, these agents still perform poorly on real-world vulnerabilities that are unknown to the agent ahead of time (zero-day vulnerabilities).
In this work, we show that teams of LLM agents can exploit real-world, zero-day vulnerabilities. Prior agents struggle with exploring many different vulnerabilities and long-range planning when used alone. To resolve this, we introduce HPTSA, a system of agents with a planning agent that can launch subagents. The planning agent explores the system and determines which subagents to call, resolving long-term planning issues when trying different vulnerabilities. We construct a benchmark of 15 real-world vulnerabilities and show that our team of agents improve over prior work by up to 4.5×…
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Cartoon
Squid humor.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.
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Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:
- I’m appearing on a panel on Society and Democracy at ACM Collective Intelligence in Boston, Massachusetts. The conference runs from June 26 through 29, 2024, and my panel is at 9:00 AM on Friday, June 28.
- I’m speaking on “Reimagining Democracy in the Age of AI” at the Bozeman Library in Bozeman, Montana, USA, July 18, 2024. The event will also be available via Zoom.
- I’m speaking at the TEDxBillings Democracy Event in Billings, Montana, USA, on July 19, 2024.
The list is maintained on …