Designing Contact-Tracing Apps
Susan Landau wrote an essay on the privacy, efficacy, and equity of contract-tracing smartphone apps.
Also see her excellent book on the topic.
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Friday Squid Blogging: Possible Evidence of Squid Paternal Care
Researchers have found possible evidence of paternal care among bigfin reef squid.
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.
ProtonMail Now Keeps IP Logs
After being compelled by a Swiss court to monitor IP logs for a particular user, ProtonMail no longer claims that “we do not keep any IP logs.”
EDITED TO ADD (9/14): This seems to be more complicated. ProtonMail is not yet saying that they keep logs. Their privacy policy still states that they do not keep logs except in certain circumstances, and outlines those circumstances. And ProtonMail’s warrant canary has an interesting list of data orders they have received from various authorities, whether they complied, and why or why not.
More Detail on the Juniper Hack and the NSA PRNG Backdoor
We knew the basics of this story, but it’s good to have more detail.
Here’s me in 2015 about this Juniper hack. Here’s me in 2007 on the NSA backdoor.
Security Risks of Relying on a Single Smartphone
Isracard used a single cell phone to communicate with credit card clients, and receive documents via WhatsApp. An employee stole the phone. He reformatted the phone and replaced the SIM card, which was oddly the best possible outcome, given the circumstances. Using the data to steal money would have been much worse.
Here’s a link to an archived version.
Lightning Cable with Embedded Eavesdropping
Normal-looking cables (USB-C, Lightning, and so on) that exfiltrate data over a wireless network.
I blogged about a previous prototype here.
Tracking People by their MAC Addresses
Yet another article on the privacy risks of static MAC addresses and always-on Bluetooth connections. This one is about wireless headphones.
The good news is that product vendors are fixing this:
Several of the headphones which could be tracked over time are for sale in electronics stores, but according to two of the manufacturers NRK have spoken to, these models are being phased out.
“The products in your line-up, Elite Active 65t, Elite 65e and Evolve 75e, will be going out of production before long and newer versions have already been launched with randomized MAC addresses. We have a lot of focus on privacy by design and we continuously work with the available security measures on the market,” head of PR at Jabra, Claus Fonnesbech says.
“To run Bluetooth Classic we, and all other vendors, are required to have static addresses and you will find that in older products,” Fonnesbech says.
Jens Bjørnkjær Gamborg, head of communications at Bang & Olufsen, says that “this is products that were launched several years ago.”
“All products launched after 2019 randomize their MAC-addresses on a frequent basis as it has become the market standard to do so,” Gamborg says.
EDITED TO ADD (9/13): It’s not enough to randomly change MAC addresses. Any other plaintext identifiers need to be changed at the same time.
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Communication
Interesting article on squid communication.
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.
Hacker-Themed Board Game
Black Hat is a hacker-themed board game.
History of the HX-63 Rotor Machine
Jon D. Paul has written the fascinating story of the HX-63, a super-complicated electromechanical rotor cipher machine made by Crypto AG.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.