Essays in the Category "Computer and Information Security"
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Autonomous AI Hacking and the Future of Cybersecurity
AI agents are automating key parts of the attack chain, threatening to tip the scales completely in favor of cyber attackers unless new models of AI-assisted cyberdefense arise.
AI agents are now hacking computers. They’re getting better at all phases of cyberattacks, faster than most of us expected. They can chain together different aspects of a cyber operation, and hack autonomously, at computer speeds and scale. This is going to change everything.
Over the summer, hackers proved the concept, industry institutionalized it, and criminals operationalized it. In June, AI company XBOW took the top spot on HackerOne’s US leaderboard after submitting over 1,000 new vulnerabilities in just a few months. In August, the seven teams competing in DARPA’s AI Cyber Challenge …
The Return to Identity-First Architecture: How the Solid Protocol Restores Digital Agency
Solid brings different pieces together into a cohesive whole that enables the identity-first architecture we should have had all along.
The current state of digital identity is a mess. Your personal information is scattered across hundreds of locations: social media companies, IoT companies, government agencies, websites you have accounts on, and data brokers you’ve never heard of. These entities collect, store, and trade your data, often without your knowledge or consent. It’s both redundant and inconsistent. You have hundreds, maybe thousands, of fragmented digital profiles that often contain contradictory or logically impossible information. Each serves its own purpose, yet there is no central override and control to serve you—as the identity owner…
Testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
Hearing titled “The Federal Government in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”
Data security breaches present significant dangers to everyone in the United States, from private citizens to corporations to government agencies to elected officials. Over the past four months, DOGE’s approach to data access has massively exacerbated the risk. DOGE employees have accessed and exfiltrated data from a variety of government agencies in order to, in part, train AI systems. Their actions have weakened security within the federal government by bypassing and disabling critical security measures, exporting sensitive data to environments with less security, and consolidating disparate data streams to create a massively attractive target for any adversary…
Why Take9 Won’t Improve Cybersecurity
The latest cybersecurity awareness campaign asks users to pause for nine seconds before clicking — but this approach misplaces responsibility and ignores the real problems of system design.
There’s a new cybersecurity awareness campaign: Take9. The idea is that people—you, me, everyone—should just pause for nine seconds and think more about the link they are planning to click on, the file they are planning to download, or whatever it is they are planning to share.
There’s a website—of course—and a video, well-produced and scary. But the campaign won’t do much to improve cybersecurity. The advice isn’t reasonable, it won’t make either individuals or nations appreciably safer, and it deflects blame from the real causes of our cyberspace insecurities…
How the Signal Chat Leak Makes the NSA’s Job Harder
Now that everyone uses the same communications technologies, security vulnerabilities are amplified.
US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who started the now-infamous group chat coordinating a US attack against the Yemen-based Houthis on March 15, is seemingly now suggesting that the secure messaging service Signal has security vulnerabilities.
"I didn’t see this loser in the group," Waltz told Fox News about Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, whom Waltz invited to the chat. "Whether he did it deliberately or it happened in some other technical mean, is something we’re trying to figure out."
Waltz’s implication that Goldberg may have hacked his way in was followed by a …
Web 3.0 Requires Data Integrity
New integrity-focused standards are necessary to enable the trusted AI services of tomorrow.
If you’ve ever taken a computer security class, you’ve probably learned about the three legs of computer security—confidentiality, integrity, and availability—known as the CIA triad. When we talk about a system being secure, that’s what we’re referring to. All are important, but to different degrees in different contexts. In a world populated by artificial intelligence (AI) systems and artificial intelligent agents, integrity will be paramount.
What is data integrity? It’s ensuring that no one can modify data—that’s the security angle—but it’s much more than that. It encompasses accuracy, completeness, and quality of data—all over both time and space. It’s preventing accidental data loss; the “undo” button is a primitive integrity measure. It’s also making sure that data is accurate when it’s collected—that it comes from a trustworthy source, that nothing important is missing, and that it doesn’t change as it moves from format to format. The ability to restart your computer is another integrity measure…
What the UK Wants from Apple Will Make Our Phones Less Safe
Once a backdoor to user data exists, everyone will want in.
Last month, the UK government demanded that Apple weaken the security of iCloud for users worldwide. On Friday, Apple took steps to comply for users in the United Kingdom. But the British law is written in a way that requires Apple to give its government access to anyone, anywhere in the world. If the government demands Apple weaken its security worldwide, it would increase everyone’s cyber-risk in an already dangerous world.
If you’re an iCloud user, you have the option of turning on something called “advanced data protection,” or ADP. In that mode, a majority of your data is end-to-end encrypted. This means that no one, not even anyone at Apple, can read that data. It’s a restriction enforced by mathematics—cryptography—and not policy. Even if someone successfully hacks iCloud, they can’t read ADP-protected data…
Let’s Start Treating Cybersecurity Like It Matters
That means a real investigatory board for cyber incidents, not the hamstrung one we’ve got now.
When an airplane crashes, impartial investigatory bodies leap into action, empowered by law to unearth what happened and why. But there is no such empowered and impartial body to investigate CrowdStrike’s faulty update that recently unfolded, ensnarling banks, airlines, and emergency services to the tune of billions of dollars. We need one. To be sure, there is the White House’s Cyber Safety Review Board. On March 20, the CSRB released a report into last summer’s intrusion by a Chinese hacking group into Microsoft’s cloud environment, where it compromised the U.S. Department of Commerce, State Department, congressional offices, and several associated companies. But the board’s report—well-researched and containing some good and actionable recommendations—shows how it suffers from its lack of subpoena power and its political unwillingness to generalize from specific incidents to the broader industry…
The CrowdStrike Outage and Market-Driven Brittleness
The outage is another consequence of companies’ sacrifice of resilience for expediency.
Friday’s massive internet outage, caused by a mid-sized tech company called CrowdStrike, disrupted major airlines, hospitals, and banks. Nearly 7,000 flights were canceled. It took down 911 systems and factories, courthouses, and television stations. Tallying the total cost will take time. The outage affected more than 8.5 million Windows computers, and the cost will surely be in the billions of dollars—easily matching the most costly previous cyberattacks, such as NotPetya.
The catastrophe is yet another reminder of how brittle global internet infrastructure is. It’s complex, deeply interconnected, and filled with single points of failure. As we experienced last week, a single problem in a small piece of software can take large swaths of the internet and global economy offline…
Book Review: The Business of Secrets
The Business of Secrets: Adventures in Selling Encryption Around the World by Fred Kinch (May 24, 2004)
The Business of Secrets: Adventures in Selling Encryption Around the World by Fred Kinch (May 24, 2024)
From the vantage point of today, it’s surreal reading about the commercial cryptography business in the 1970s. Nobody knew anything. The manufacturers didn’t know whether the cryptography they sold was any good. The customers didn’t know whether the crypto they bought was any good. Everyone pretended to know, thought they knew, or knew better than to even try to know.
The Business of Secrets is the self-published memoirs of Fred Kinch. He was founder and vice president of—mostly sales—at a US cryptographic hardware company called Datotek, from company’s founding in 1969 until 1982. It’s mostly a disjointed collection of stories about the difficulties of selling to governments worldwide, along with descriptions of the highs and (mostly) lows of foreign airlines, foreign hotels, and foreign travel in general. But it’s also about encryption…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.