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Trusted and Trustworthy AI

In 2016, I wrote about an Internet that affected the world in a direct, physical manner. It was connected to your smartphone. It had sensors like cameras and thermostats. It had actuators: Drones, autonomous cars. And it had smarts in the middle, using sensor data to figure out what to do and then actually do it. This was the Internet of Things (IoT).

The classical definition of a robot is something that senses, thinks, and acts—that’s today’s Internet. We’ve been building a world-sized robot without even realizing it.

In 2023, we upgraded the “thinking” part with large-language models (LLMs) like GPT. ChatGPT both surprised and amazed the world with its ability to understand human language and generate credible, on-topic, humanlike responses. But what these are really good at is interacting with systems formerly designed for humans. Their accuracy will get better, and they will be used to replace actual humans.

In 2024, we’re going to start connecting those LLMs and other AI systems to both sensors and actuators. In other words, they will be connected to the larger world, through APIs. They will receive direct inputs from our environment, in all the forms I thought about in 2016. And they will increasingly control our environment, through IoT devices and beyond.

It will start small: Summarizing emails and writing limited responses. Arguing with customer service—on chat—for service changes and refunds. Making travel reservations.

But these AIs will interact with the physical world as well, first controlling robots and then having those robots as part of them. Your AI-driven thermostat will turn the heat and air conditioning on based also on who’s in what room, their preferences, and where they are likely to go next. It will negotiate with the power company for the cheapest rates by scheduling usage of high-energy appliances or car recharging.

This is the easy stuff. The real changes will happen when these AIs group together in a larger intelligence: A vast network of power generation and power consumption with each building just a node, like an ant colony or a human army.

Future industrial-control systems will include traditional factory robots, as well as AI systems to schedule their operation. It will automatically order supplies, as well as coordinate final product shipping. The AI will manage its own finances, interacting with other systems in the banking world. It will call on humans as needed: to repair individual subsystems or to do things too specialized for the robots.

Consider driverless cars. Individual vehicles have sensors, of course, but they also make use of sensors embedded in the roads and on poles. The real processing is done in the cloud, by a centralized system that is piloting all the vehicles. This allows individual cars to coordinate their movement for more efficiency: braking in synchronization, for example.

These are robots, but not the sort familiar from movies and television. We think of robots as discrete metal objects, with sensors and actuators on their surface, and processing logic inside. But our new robots are different. Their sensors and actuators are distributed in the environment. Their processing is somewhere else. They’re a network of individual units that become a robot only in aggregate.

This turns our notion of security on its head. If massive, decentralized AIs run everything, then who controls those AIs matters a lot. It’s as if all the executive assistants or lawyers in an industry worked for the same agency. An AI that is both trusted and trustworthy will become a critical requirement.

This future requires us to see ourselves less as individuals, and more as parts of larger systems. It’s AI as nature, as Gaia—everything as one system. It’s a future more aligned with the Buddhist philosophy of interconnectedness than Western ideas of individuality. (And also with science-fiction dystopias, like Skynet from the Terminator movies.) It will require a rethinking of much of our assumptions about governance and economy. That’s not going to happen soon, but in 2024 we will see the first steps along that path.

This essay previously appeared in Wired.

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Posted on December 15, 2023 at 7:01 AM • View Comments

Surveillance by the US Postal Service

This is not about mass surveillance of mail, this is about the sorts of targeted surveillance the US Postal Inspection Service uses to catch mail thieves:

To track down an alleged mail thief, a US postal inspector used license plate reader technology, GPS data collected by a rental car company, and, most damning of all, hid a camera inside one of the targeted blue post boxes which captured the suspect’s full face as they allegedly helped themselves to swathes of peoples’ mail.

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Posted on December 13, 2023 at 7:04 AM • View Comments

New Windows/Linux Firmware Attack

Interesting attack based on malicious pre-OS logo images:

LogoFAIL is a constellation of two dozen newly discovered vulnerabilities that have lurked for years, if not decades, in Unified Extensible Firmware Interfaces responsible for booting modern devices that run Windows or Linux….

The vulnerabilities are the subject of a coordinated mass disclosure released Wednesday. The participating companies comprise nearly the entirety of the x64 and ARM CPU ecosystem, starting with UEFI suppliers AMI, Insyde, and Phoenix (sometimes still called IBVs or independent BIOS vendors); device manufacturers such as Lenovo, Dell, and HP; and the makers of the CPUs that go inside the devices, usually Intel, AMD or designers of ARM CPUs….

As its name suggests, LogoFAIL involves logos, specifically those of the hardware seller that are displayed on the device screen early in the boot process, while the UEFI is still running. Image parsers in UEFIs from all three major IBVs are riddled with roughly a dozen critical vulnerabilities that have gone unnoticed until now. By replacing the legitimate logo images with identical-looking ones that have been specially crafted to exploit these bugs, LogoFAIL makes it possible to execute malicious code at the most sensitive stage of the boot process, which is known as DXE, short for Driver Execution Environment.

“Once arbitrary code execution is achieved during the DXE phase, it’s game over for platform security,” researchers from Binarly, the security firm that discovered the vulnerabilities, wrote in a whitepaper. “From this stage, we have full control over the memory and the disk of the target device, thus including the operating system that will be started.”

From there, LogoFAIL can deliver a second-stage payload that drops an executable onto the hard drive before the main OS has even started.

Details.

It’s an interesting vulnerability. Corporate buyers want the ability to display their own logos, and not the logos of the hardware makers. So the ability has to be in the BIOS, which means that the vulnerabilities aren’t being protected by any of the OS’s defenses. And the BIOS makers probably pulled some random graphics library off the Internet and never gave it a moment’s thought after that.

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Posted on December 12, 2023 at 7:01 AM • View Comments

Friday Squid Blogging: Influencer Accidentally Posts Restaurant Table QR Ordering Code

Another rare security + squid story:

The woman—who has only been identified by her surname, Wang—was having a meal with friends at a hotpot restaurant in Kunming, a city in southwest China. When everyone’s selections arrived at the table, she posted a photo of the spread on the Chinese social media platform WeChat. What she didn’t notice was that she’d included the QR code on her table, which the restaurant’s customers use to place their orders.

Even though the photo was only shared with her WeChat friends list and not the entire social network, someone—or a lot of someones—used that QR code to add a ridiculous amount of food to her order. Wang was absolutely shocked to learn that “her” meal soon included 1,850 orders of duck blood, 2,580 orders of squid, and an absolutely bonkers 9,990 orders of shrimp paste.

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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Posted on December 8, 2023 at 5:03 PM • View Comments

New Bluetooth Attack

New attack breaks forward secrecy in Bluetooth.

Three news articles:

BLUFFS is a series of exploits targeting Bluetooth, aiming to break Bluetooth sessions’ forward and future secrecy, compromising the confidentiality of past and future communications between devices.

This is achieved by exploiting four flaws in the session key derivation process, two of which are new, to force the derivation of a short, thus weak and predictable session key (SKC).

Next, the attacker brute-forces the key, enabling them to decrypt past communication and decrypt or manipulate future communications.

The vulnerability has been around for at least a decade.

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Posted on December 8, 2023 at 7:05 AM • View Comments

Spying through Push Notifications

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.”

Google said that it shared Wyden’s “commitment to keeping users informed about these requests.”

The Department of Justice did not return messages seeking comment on the push notification surveillance or whether it had prevented Apple of Google from talking about it.

Wyden’s letter cited a “tip” as the source of the information about the surveillance. His staff did not elaborate on the tip, but a source familiar with the matter confirmed that both foreign and U.S. government agencies have been asking Apple and Google for metadata related to push notifications to, for example, help tie anonymous users of messaging apps to specific Apple or Google accounts.

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Posted on December 7, 2023 at 7:02 AM • View Comments

Security Analysis of a Thirteenth-Century Venetian Election Protocol

Interesting analysis:

This paper discusses the protocol used for electing the Doge of Venice between 1268 and the end of the Republic in 1797. We will show that it has some useful properties that in addition to being interesting in themselves, also suggest that its fundamental design principle is worth investigating for application to leader election protocols in computer science. For example, it gives some opportunities to minorities while ensuring that more popular candidates are more likely to win, and offers some resistance to corruption of voters.

The most obvious feature of this protocol is that it is complicated and would have taken a long time to carry out. We will also advance a hypothesis as to why it is so complicated, and describe a simplified protocol with very similar properties.

And the conclusion:

Schneier has used the phrase “security theatre” to describe public actions which do not increase security, but which are designed to make the public think that the organization carrying out the actions is taking security seriously. (He describes some examples of this in response to the 9/11 suicide attacks.) This phrase is usually used pejoratively. However, security theatre has positive aspects too, provided that it is not used as a substitute for actions that would actually improve security. In the context of the election of the Doge, the complexity of the protocol had the effect that all the oligarchs took part in a long, involved ritual in which they demonstrated individually and collectively to each other that they took seriously their responsibility to try to elect a Doge who would act for the good of Venice, and also that they would submit to the rule of the Doge after he was elected. This demonstration was particularly important given the disastrous consequences in other Mediaeval Italian city states of unsuitable rulers or civil strife between different aristocratic factions.

It would have served, too, as commercial brand-building for Venice, reassuring the oligarchs’ customers and trading partners that the city was likely to remain stable and business-friendly. After the election, the security theatre continued for several days of elaborate processions and parties. There is also some evidence of security theatre outside the election period. A 16th century engraving by Mateo Pagan depicting the lavish parade which took place in Venice each year on Palm Sunday shows the balotino in the parade, in a prominent position—next to the Grand Chancellor—and dressed in what appears to be a special costume.

I like that this paper has been accepted at a cybersecurity conference.

And, for the record, I have written about the positive aspects of security theater.

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Posted on December 6, 2023 at 1:18 PM • View Comments

AI and Mass Spying

Spying and surveillance are different but related things. If I hired a private detective to spy on you, that detective could hide a bug in your home or car, tap your phone, and listen to what you said. At the end, I would get a report of all the conversations you had and the contents of those conversations. If I hired that same private detective to put you under surveillance, I would get a different report: where you went, whom you talked to, what you purchased, what you did.

Before the internet, putting someone under surveillance was expensive and time-consuming. You had to manually follow someone around, noting where they went, whom they talked to, what they purchased, what they did, and what they read. That world is forever gone. Our phones track our locations. Credit cards track our purchases. Apps track whom we talk to, and e-readers know what we read. Computers collect data about what we’re doing on them, and as both storage and processing have become cheaper, that data is increasingly saved and used. What was manual and individual has become bulk and mass. Surveillance has become the business model of the internet, and there’s no reasonable way for us to opt out of it.

Spying is another matter. It has long been possible to tap someone’s phone or put a bug in their home and/or car, but those things still require someone to listen to and make sense of the conversations. Yes, spyware companies like NSO Group help the government hack into people’s phones, but someone still has to sort through all the conversations. And governments like China could censor social media posts based on particular words or phrases, but that was coarse and easy to bypass. Spying is limited by the need for human labor.

AI is about to change that. Summarization is something a modern generative AI system does well. Give it an hourlong meeting, and it will return a one-page summary of what was said. Ask it to search through millions of conversations and organize them by topic, and it’ll do that. Want to know who is talking about what? It’ll tell you.

The technologies aren’t perfect; some of them are pretty primitive. They miss things that are important. They get other things wrong. But so do humans. And, unlike humans, AI tools can be replicated by the millions and are improving at astonishing rates. They’ll get better next year, and even better the year after that. We are about to enter the era of mass spying.

Mass surveillance fundamentally changed the nature of surveillance. Because all the data is saved, mass surveillance allows people to conduct surveillance backward in time, and without even knowing whom specifically you want to target. Tell me where this person was last year. List all the red sedans that drove down this road in the past month. List all of the people who purchased all the ingredients for a pressure cooker bomb in the past year. Find me all the pairs of phones that were moving toward each other, turned themselves off, then turned themselves on again an hour later while moving away from each other (a sign of a secret meeting).

Similarly, mass spying will change the nature of spying. All the data will be saved. It will all be searchable, and understandable, in bulk. Tell me who has talked about a particular topic in the past month, and how discussions about that topic have evolved. Person A did something; check if someone told them to do it. Find everyone who is plotting a crime, or spreading a rumor, or planning to attend a political protest.

There’s so much more. To uncover an organizational structure, look for someone who gives similar instructions to a group of people, then all the people they have relayed those instructions to. To find people’s confidants, look at whom they tell secrets to. You can track friendships and alliances as they form and break, in minute detail. In short, you can know everything about what everybody is talking about.

This spying is not limited to conversations on our phones or computers. Just as cameras everywhere fueled mass surveillance, microphones everywhere will fuel mass spying. Siri and Alexa and “Hey Google” are already always listening; the conversations just aren’t being saved yet.

Knowing that they are under constant surveillance changes how people behave. They conform. They self-censor, with the chilling effects that brings. Surveillance facilitates social control, and spying will only make this worse. Governments around the world already use mass surveillance; they will engage in mass spying as well.

Corporations will spy on people. Mass surveillance ushered in the era of personalized advertisements; mass spying will supercharge that industry. Information about what people are talking about, their moods, their secrets—it’s all catnip for marketers looking for an edge. The tech monopolies that are currently keeping us all under constant surveillance won’t be able to resist collecting and using all of that data.

In the early days of Gmail, Google talked about using people’s Gmail content to serve them personalized ads. The company stopped doing it, almost certainly because the keyword data it collected was so poor—and therefore not useful for marketing purposes. That will soon change. Maybe Google won’t be the first to spy on its users’ conversations, but once others start, they won’t be able to resist. Their true customers—their advertisers—will demand it.

We could limit this capability. We could prohibit mass spying. We could pass strong data-privacy rules. But we haven’t done anything to limit mass surveillance. Why would spying be any different?

This essay originally appeared in Slate.

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Posted on December 5, 2023 at 7:10 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.