Collaborate Disseminate
A Raspberry Pi is a tiny computer designed for makers and all sorts of Internet-of-Things types of projects. Make magazine has an article about securing it. Reading it, I am struck by how much work it is to secure. I fear that this is beyond the capabilities of most tinkerers, and the result will be even more insecure IoT devices…. Continue reading Securing a Raspberry Pi
Kaspersky Labs exposed a highly sophisticated set of hacking tools from Russia called WhiteBear. From February to September 2016, WhiteBear activity was narrowly focused on embassies and consular operations around the world. All of these early WhiteBear targets were related to embassies and diplomatic/foreign affair organizations. Continued WhiteBear activity later shifted to include defense-related organizations into June 2017. When compared… Continue reading Russian Hacking Tools Codenamed WhiteBear Exposed
New paper: "Policy measures and cyber insurance: a framework," by Daniel Woods and Andrew Simpson, Journal of Cyber Policy, 2017. Abstract: The role of the insurance industry in driving improvements in cyber security has been identified as mutually beneficial for both insurers and policy-makers. To date, there has been no consideration of the roles governments and the insurance industry should… Continue reading A Framework for Cyber Security Insurance
Researchers demonstrated a really clever hack: they hid malware in a replacement smart phone screen. The idea is that you would naively bring your smart phone in for repair, and the repair shop would install this malicious screen without your knowledge. The malware is hidden in touchscreen controller software, which is trusted by the phone. The concern arises from research… Continue reading Hacking a Phone Through a Replacement Touchscreen
There is an unpatchable vulnerability that affects most modern cars. It’s buried in the Controller Area Network (CAN): Researchers say this flaw is not a vulnerability in the classic meaning of the word. This is because the flaw is more of a CAN standard design choice that makes it unpatchable. Patching the issue means changing how the CAN standard works… Continue reading Unfixable Automobile Computer Security Vulnerability
One of the common ways to hack a computer is to mess with its input data. That is, if you can feed the computer data that it interprets — or misinterprets — in a particular way, you can trick the computer into doing things that it wasn’t intended to do. This is basically what a buffer overflow attack is: the… Continue reading Hacking a Gene Sequencer by Encoding Malware in a DNA Strand
This is a weird story: researchers have discovered that an audio driver installed in some HP laptops includes a keylogger, which records all keystrokes to a local file. There seems to be nothing malicious about this, but it’s a vivid illustration of how hard it is to secure a modern computer. The operating system, drivers, processes, application software, and everything… Continue reading Keylogger Found in HP Laptop Audio Drivers
There’s a concept from computer security known as a class break. It’s a particular security vulnerability that breaks not just one system, but an entire class of systems. Examples might be a vulnerability in a particular operating system that allows an attacker to take remote control of every computer that runs on that system’s software. Or a vulnerability in Internet-enabled… Continue reading Class Breaks
Google has released Project Wycheproof a test suite designed to test cryptographic libraries against a series of known attacks. From a blog post: In cryptography, subtle mistakes can have catastrophic consequences, and mistakes in open source cryptographic software libraries repeat too often and remain undiscovered for too long. Good implementation guidelines, however, are hard to come by: understanding how to… Continue reading Google Releases Crypto Test Suite
Susan Landau has an excellent essay on why it’s more important than ever to have backdoor-free encryption on our computer and communications systems. Protecting the privacy of speech is crucial for preserving our democracy. We live at a time when tracking an individual — a journalist, a member of the political opposition, a citizen engaged in peaceful protest — or… Continue reading Securing Communications in a Trump Administration