Category Archives: national security policy

Microsoft and Security Incentives

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Former senior White House cyber policy director A. J. Grotto talks about the economic incentives for companies to improve their security—in particular, Microsoft:

Grotto told us Microsoft had to be “dragged kicking and screaming” to provide logging capabilities to the government by default, and given the fact the mega-corp banked around $20 billion in revenue from security services last year, the concession was minimal at best.

[…]

“The government needs to focus on encouraging and catalyzing competition,” Grotto said. He believes it also needs to publicly scrutinize Microsoft and make sure everyone knows when it messes up…

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Backdoor in XZ Utils That Almost Happened

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Last week, the Internet dodged a major nation-state attack that would have had catastrophic cybersecurity repercussions worldwide. It’s a catastrophe that didn’t happen, so it won’t get much attention—but it should. There’s an important moral to the story of the attack and its discovery: The security of the global Internet depends on countless obscure pieces of software written and maintained by even more obscure unpaid, distractible, and sometimes vulnerable volunteers. It’s an untenable situation, and one that is being exploited by malicious actors. Yet precious little is being done to remedy it…

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OpenAI Is Not Training on Your Dropbox Documents—Today

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There’s a rumor flying around the Internet that OpenAI is training foundation models on your Dropbox documents.

Here’s CNBC. Here’s Boing Boing. Some articles are more nuanced, but there’s still a lot of confusion.

It seems not to be true. Dropbox isn’t sharing all of your documents with OpenAI. But here’s the problem: we don’t trust OpenAI. We don’t trust tech corporations. And—to be fair—corporations in general. We have no reason to.

Simon Willison nails it in a tweet:

“OpenAI are training on every piece of data they see, even when they say they aren’t” is the new “Facebook are showing you ads based on overhearing everything you say through your phone’s microphone.”…

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Spying through Push Notifications

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When you get a push notification on your Apple or Google phone, those notifications go through Apple and Google servers. Which means that those companies can spy on them—either for their own reasons or in response to government demands.

Sen. Wyden is trying to get to the bottom of this:

In a statement, Apple said that Wyden’s letter gave them the opening they needed to share more details with the public about how governments monitored push notifications.

“In this case, the federal government prohibited us from sharing any information,” the company said in a statement. “Now that this method has become public we are updating our transparency reporting to detail these kinds of requests.”…

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EPA Won’t Force Water Utilities to Audit Their Cybersecurity

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The industry pushed back:

Despite the EPA’s willingness to provide training and technical support to help states and public water system organizations implement cybersecurity surveys, the move garnered opposition from both GOP state attorneys and trade groups.

Republican state attorneys that were against the new proposed policies said that the call for new inspections could overwhelm state regulators. The attorney generals of Arkansas, Iowa and Missouri all sued the EPA—claiming the agency had no authority to set these requirements. This led to the EPA’s proposal being …

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Child Exploitation and the Crypto Wars

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Susan Landau published an excellent essay on the current justification for the government breaking end-to-end-encryption: child sexual abuse and exploitation (CSAE). She puts the debate into historical context, discusses the problem of CSAE, and explai… Continue reading Child Exploitation and the Crypto Wars→

AI Risks

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There is no shortage of researchers and industry titans willing to warn us about the potential destructive power of artificial intelligence. Reading the headlines, one would hope that the rapid gains in AI technology have also brought forth a unifying realization of the risks—and the steps we need to take to mitigate them.

The reality, unfortunately, is quite different. Beneath almost all of the testimony, the manifestoes, the blog posts, and the public declarations issued about AI are battles among deeply divided factions. Some are concerned about far-future risks that sound like science fiction. Some are genuinely alarmed by the practical problems that chatbots and deepfake video generators are creating right now. Some are motivated by potential business revenue, others by national security concerns…

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NSA AI Security Center

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The NSA is starting a new artificial intelligence security center:

The AI security center’s establishment follows an NSA study that identified securing AI models from theft and sabotage as a major national security challenge, especially as generative AI technologies emerge with immense transformative potential for both good and evil.

Nakasone said it would become “NSA’s focal point for leveraging foreign intelligence insights, contributing to the development of best practices guidelines, principles, evaluation, methodology and risk frameworks” for both AI security and the goal of promoting the secure development and adoption of AI within “our national security systems and our defense industrial base.”…

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You Can’t Rush Post-Quantum-Computing Cryptography Standards

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I just read an article complaining that NIST is taking too long in finalizing its post-quantum-computing cryptography standards.

This process has been going on since 2016, and since that time there has been a huge increase in quantum technology and an equally large increase in quantum understanding and interest. Yet seven years later, we have only four algorithms, although last week NIST announced that a number of other candidates are under consideration, a process that is expected to take “several years.

The delay in developing quantum-resistant algorithms is especially troubling given the time it will take to get those products to market. It generally takes four to six years with a new standard for a vendor to develop an ASIC to implement the standard, and it then takes time for the vendor to get the product validated, which seems to be taking a troubling amount of time…

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New SEC Rules around Cybersecurity Incident Disclosures

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The US Securities and Exchange Commission adopted final rules around the disclosure of cybersecurity incidents. There are two basic rules:

  1. Public companies must “disclose any cybersecurity incident they determine to be material” within four days, with potential delays if there is a national security risk.
  2. Public companies must “describe their processes, if any, for assessing, identifying, and managing material risks from cybersecurity threats” in their annual filings.

The rules go into effect this December.

In an email newsletter, Melissa Hathaway wrote:…

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