Schneier on Security

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2025-05-05T20:44:45Z
Updated: 11 hours 12 min ago

Chinese AI Submersible

Wed, 05/07/2025 - 7:03am

A Chinese company has developed an AI-piloted submersible that can reach speeds “similar to a destroyer or a US Navy torpedo,” dive “up to 60 metres underwater,” and “remain static for more than a month, like the stealth capabilities of a nuclear submarine.” In case you’re worried about the military applications of this, you can relax because the company says that the submersible is “designated for civilian use” and can “launch research rockets.”

“Research rockets.” Sure.

...

Fake Student Fraud in Community Colleges

Tue, 05/06/2025 - 7:03am

Reporting on the rise of fake students enrolling in community college courses:

The bots’ goal is to bilk state and federal financial aid money by enrolling in classes, and remaining enrolled in them, long enough for aid disbursements to go out. They often accomplish this by submitting AI-generated work. And because community colleges accept all applicants, they’ve been almost exclusively impacted by the fraud.

The article talks about the rise of this type of fraud, the difficulty of detecting it, and how it upends quite a bit of the class structure and learning community...

Another Move in the Deepfake Creation/Detection Arms Race

Mon, 05/05/2025 - 12:02pm

Deepfakes are now mimicking heartbeats

In a nutshell

  • Recent research reveals that high-quality deepfakes unintentionally retain the heartbeat patterns from their source videos, undermining traditional detection methods that relied on detecting subtle skin color changes linked to heartbeats.
  • The assumption that deepfakes lack physiological signals, such as heart rate, is no longer valid. This challenges many existing detection tools, which may need significant redesigns to keep up with the evolving technology.
  • To effectively identify high-quality deepfakes, researchers suggest shifting focus from just detecting heart rate signals to analyzing how blood flow is distributed across different facial regions, providing a more accurate detection strategy...

Friday Squid Blogging: Pyjama Squid

Fri, 05/02/2025 - 5:02pm

The small pyjama squid (Sepioloidea lineolata) produces toxic slime, “a rare example of a poisonous predatory mollusc.”

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Privacy for Agentic AI

Fri, 05/02/2025 - 2:04pm

Sooner or later, it’s going to happen. AI systems will start acting as agents, doing things on our behalf with some degree of autonomy. I think it’s worth thinking about the security of that now, while its still a nascent idea.

In 2019, I joined Inrupt, a company that is commercializing Tim Berners-Lee’s open protocol for distributed data ownership. We are working on a digital wallet that can make use of AI in this way. (We used to call it an “active wallet.” Now we’re calling it an “agentic wallet.”)

I talked about this a bit at the RSA Conference...

NCSC Guidance on “Advanced Cryptography”

Fri, 05/02/2025 - 7:03am

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre just released its white paper on “Advanced Cryptography,” which it defines as “cryptographic techniques for processing encrypted data, providing enhanced functionality over and above that provided by traditional cryptography.” It includes things like homomorphic encryption, attribute-based encryption, zero-knowledge proofs, and secure multiparty computation.

It’s full of good advice. I especially appreciate this warning:

When deciding whether to use Advanced Cryptography, start with a clear articulation of the problem, and use that to guide the development of an appropriate solution. That is, you should not start with an Advanced Cryptography technique, and then attempt to fit the functionality it provides to the problem. ...

US as a Surveillance State

Thu, 05/01/2025 - 12:02pm

Two essays were just published on DOGE’s data collection and aggregation, and how it ends with a modern surveillance state.

It’s good to see this finally being talked about.

WhatsApp Case Against NSO Group Progressing

Wed, 04/30/2025 - 7:12am

Meta is suing NSO Group, basically claiming that the latter hacks WhatsApp and not just WhatsApp users. We have a procedural ruling:

Under the order, NSO Group is prohibited from presenting evidence about its customers’ identities, implying the targeted WhatsApp users are suspected or actual criminals, or alleging that WhatsApp had insufficient security protections.

[…]

In making her ruling, Northern District of California Judge Phyllis Hamilton said NSO Group undercut its arguments to use evidence about its customers with contradictory statements...

Applying Security Engineering to Prompt Injection Security

Tue, 04/29/2025 - 7:03am

This seems like an important advance in LLM security against prompt injection:

Google DeepMind has unveiled CaMeL (CApabilities for MachinE Learning), a new approach to stopping prompt-injection attacks that abandons the failed strategy of having AI models police themselves. Instead, CaMeL treats language models as fundamentally untrusted components within a secure software framework, creating clear boundaries between user commands and potentially malicious content.

[…]

To understand CaMeL, you need to understand that prompt injections happen when AI systems can’t distinguish between legitimate user commands and malicious instructions hidden in content they’re processing...

Windscribe Acquitted on Charges of Not Collecting Users’ Data

Mon, 04/28/2025 - 2:17pm

The company doesn’t keep logs, so couldn’t turn over data:

Windscribe, a globally used privacy-first VPN service, announced today that its founder, Yegor Sak, has been fully acquitted by a court in Athens, Greece, following a two-year legal battle in which Sak was personally charged in connection with an alleged internet offence by an unknown user of the service.

The case centred around a Windscribe-owned server in Finland that was allegedly used to breach a system in Greece. Greek authorities, in cooperation with INTERPOL, traced the IP address to Windscribe’s infrastructure and, unlike standard international procedures, proceeded to initiate criminal proceedings against Sak himself, rather than pursuing information through standard corporate channels...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Facts on Your Phone

Fri, 04/25/2025 - 5:08pm

Text “SQUID” to 1-833-SCI-TEXT for daily squid facts. The website has merch.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Cryptocurrency Thefts Get Physical

Fri, 04/25/2025 - 7:07am

Long story of a $250 million cryptocurrency theft that, in a complicated chain events, resulted in a pretty brutal kidnapping.

New Linux Rootkit

Thu, 04/24/2025 - 3:35pm

Interesting:

The company has released a working rootkit called “Curing” that uses io_uring, a feature built into the Linux kernel, to stealthily perform malicious activities without being caught by many of the detection solutions currently on the market.

At the heart of the issue is the heavy reliance on monitoring system calls, which has become the go-to method for many cybersecurity vendors. The problem? Attackers can completely sidestep these monitored calls by leaning on io_uring instead. This clever method could let bad actors quietly make network connections or tamper with files without triggering the usual alarms...

Regulating AI Behavior with a Hypervisor

Wed, 04/23/2025 - 12:02pm

Interesting research: “Guillotine: Hypervisors for Isolating Malicious AIs.”

Abstract:As AI models become more embedded in critical sectors like finance, healthcare, and the military, their inscrutable behavior poses ever-greater risks to society. To mitigate this risk, we propose Guillotine, a hypervisor architecture for sandboxing powerful AI models—models that, by accident or malice, can generate existential threats to humanity. Although Guillotine borrows some well-known virtualization techniques, Guillotine must also introduce fundamentally new isolation mechanisms to handle the unique threat model posed by existential-risk AIs. For example, a rogue AI may try to introspect upon hypervisor software or the underlying hardware substrate to enable later subversion of that control plane; thus, a Guillotine hypervisor requires careful co-design of the hypervisor software and the CPUs, RAM, NIC, and storage devices that support the hypervisor software, to thwart side channel leakage and more generally eliminate mechanisms for AI to exploit reflection-based vulnerabilities. Beyond such isolation at the software, network, and microarchitectural layers, a Guillotine hypervisor must also provide physical fail-safes more commonly associated with nuclear power plants, avionic platforms, and other types of mission critical systems. Physical fail-safes, e.g., involving electromechanical disconnection of network cables, or the flooding of a datacenter which holds a rogue AI, provide defense in depth if software, network, and microarchitectural isolation is compromised and a rogue AI must be temporarily shut down or permanently destroyed. ...

Android Improves Its Security

Tue, 04/22/2025 - 12:03pm

Android phones will soon reboot themselves after sitting idle for three days. iPhones have had this feature for a while; it’s nice to see Google add it to their phones.

Friday Squid Blogging: Live Colossal Squid Filmed

Fri, 04/18/2025 - 5:02pm

A live colossal squid was filmed for the first time in the ocean. It’s only a juvenile: a foot long.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Age Verification Using Facial Scans

Thu, 04/17/2025 - 12:38pm

Discord is testing the feature:

“We’re currently running tests in select regions to age-gate access to certain spaces or user settings,” a spokesperson for Discord said in a statement. “The information shared to power the age verification method is only used for the one-time age verification process and is not stored by Discord or our vendor. For Face Scan, the solution our vendor uses operates on-device, which means there is no collection of any biometric information when you scan your face. For ID verification, the scan of your ID is deleted upon verification.”...

CVE Program Almost Unfunded

Wed, 04/16/2025 - 11:19am

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...

Slopsquatting

Tue, 04/15/2025 - 12:02pm

As AI coding assistants invent nonexistent software libraries to download and use, enterprising attackers create and upload libraries with those names—laced with malware, of course.

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

Mon, 04/14/2025 - 12:04pm

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

  • I’m giving an online talk on AI and trust for the Weizenbaum Institute on April 24, 2025 at 2:00 PM CEST (8:00 AM ET).

The list is maintained on this page.

 

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