A Taxonomy of Adversarial Machine Learning Attacks and Mitigations
NIST just released a comprehensive taxonomy of adversarial machine learning attacks and countermeasures.
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AI Data Poisoning
Cloudflare has a new feature—available to free users as well—that uses AI to generate random pages to feed to AI web crawlers:
Instead of simply blocking bots, Cloudflare’s new system lures them into a “maze” of realistic-looking but irrelevant pages, wasting the crawler’s computing resources. The approach is a notable shift from the standard block-and-defend strategy used by most website protection services. Cloudflare says blocking bots sometimes backfires because it alerts the crawler’s operators that they’ve been detected.
“When we detect unauthorized crawling, rather than blocking the request, we will link to a series of AI-generated pages that are convincing enough to entice a crawler to traverse them,” writes Cloudflare. “But while real looking, this content is not actually the content of the site we are protecting, so the crawler wastes time and resources.”
The company says the content served to bots is deliberately irrelevant to the website being crawled, but it is carefully sourced or generated using real scientific facts—such as neutral information about biology, physics, or mathematics—to avoid spreading misinformation (whether this approach effectively prevents misinformation, however, remains unproven).
It’s basically an AI-generated honeypot. And AI scraping is a growing problem:
The scale of AI crawling on the web appears substantial, according to Cloudflare’s data that lines up with anecdotal reports we’ve heard from sources. The company says that AI crawlers generate more than 50 billion requests to their network daily, amounting to nearly 1 percent of all web traffic they process. Many of these crawlers collect website data to train large language models without permission from site owners….
Presumably the crawlers will now have to up both their scraping stealth and their ability to filter out AI-generated content like this. Which means the honeypots will have to get better at detecting scrapers and more stealthy in their fake content. This arms race is likely to go back and forth, wasting a lot of energy in the process.
Report on Paragon Spyware
Citizen Lab has a new report on Paragon’s spyware:
Key Findings:
- Introducing Paragon Solutions. Paragon Solutions was founded in Israel in 2019 and sells spyware called Graphite. The company differentiates itself by claiming it has safeguards to prevent the kinds of spyware abuses that NSO Group and other vendors are notorious for.
- Infrastructure Analysis of Paragon Spyware. Based on a tip from a collaborator, we mapped out server infrastructure that we attribute to Paragon’s Graphite spyware tool. We identified a subset of suspected Paragon deployments, including in Australia, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Israel, and Singapore.
- Identifying a Possible Canadian Paragon Customer. Our investigation surfaced potential links between Paragon Solutions and the Canadian Ontario Provincial Police, and found evidence of a growing ecosystem of spyware capability among Ontario-based police services.
- Helping WhatsApp Catch a Zero-Click. We shared our analysis of Paragon’s infrastructure with Meta, who told us that the details were pivotal to their ongoing investigation into Paragon. WhatsApp discovered and mitigated an active Paragon zero-click exploit, and later notified over 90 individuals who it believed were targeted, including civil society members in Italy.
- Android Forensic Analysis: Italian Cluster. We forensically analyzed multiple Android phones belonging to Paragon targets in Italy (an acknowledged Paragon user) who were notified by WhatsApp. We found clear indications that spyware had been loaded into WhatsApp, as well as other apps on their devices.
- A Related Case of iPhone Spyware in Italy. We analyzed the iPhone of an individual who worked closely with confirmed Android Paragon targets. This person received an Apple threat notification in November 2024, but no WhatsApp notification. Our analysis showed an attempt to infect the device with novel spyware in June 2024. We shared details with Apple, who confirmed they had patched the attack in iOS 18.
- Other Surveillance Tech Deployed Against The Same Italian Cluster. We also note 2024 warnings sent by Meta to several individuals in the same organizational cluster, including a Paragon victim, suggesting the need for further scrutiny into other surveillance technology deployed against these individuals.
More Countries are Demanding Backdoors to Encrypted Apps
Last month, I wrote about the UK forcing Apple to break its Advanced Data Protection encryption in iCloud. More recently, both Sweden and France are contemplating mandating backdoors. Both initiatives are attempting to scare people into supporting backdoors, which are—of course—are terrible idea.
Also: “A Feminist Argument Against Weakening Encryption.”
EDITED TO ADD (4/14): The French proposal was voted down.
Friday Squid Blogging: A New Explanation of Squid Camouflage
New research:
An associate professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Northeastern University, Deravi’s recently published paper in the Journal of Materials Chemistry C sheds new light on how squid use organs that essentially function as organic solar cells to help power their camouflage abilities.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
My Writings Are in the LibGen AI Training Corpus
The Atlantic has a search tool that allows you to search for specific works in the “LibGen” database of copyrighted works that Meta used to train its AI models. (The rest of the article is behind a paywall, but not the search tool.)
It’s impossible to know exactly which parts of LibGen Meta used to train its AI, and which parts it might have decided to exclude; this snapshot was taken in January 2025, after Meta is known to have accessed the database, so some titles here would not have been available to download.
Still…interesting.
Searching my name yields 199 results: all of my books in different versions, plus a bunch of shorter items.
NCSC Releases Post-Quantum Cryptography Timeline
The UK’s National Computer Security Center (part of GCHQ) released a timeline—also see their blog post—for migration to quantum-computer-resistant cryptography.
It even made The Guardian.
Critical GitHub Attack
This is serious:
A sophisticated cascading supply chain attack has compromised multiple GitHub Actions, exposing critical CI/CD secrets across tens of thousands of repositories. The attack, which originally targeted the widely used “tj-actions/changed-files” utility, is now believed to have originated from an earlier breach of the “reviewdog/action-setup@v1” GitHub Action, according to a report.
[…]
CISA confirmed the vulnerability has been patched in version 46.0.1.
Given that the utility is used by more than 23,000 GitHub repositories, the scale of potential impact has raised significant alarm throughout the developer community.
Is Security Human Factors Research Skewed Towards Western Ideas and Habits?
Really interesting research: “How WEIRD is Usable Privacy and Security Research?” by Ayako A. Hasegawa Daisuke Inoue, and Mitsuaki Akiyama:
Abstract: In human factor fields such as human-computer interaction (HCI) and psychology, researchers have been concerned that participants mostly come from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) countries. This WEIRD skew may hinder understanding of diverse populations and their cultural differences. The usable privacy and security (UPS) field has inherited many research methodologies from research on human factor fields. We conducted a literature review to understand the extent to which participant samples in UPS papers were from WEIRD countries and the characteristics of the methodologies and research topics in each user study recruiting Western or non-Western participants. We found that the skew toward WEIRD countries in UPS is greater than that in HCI. Geographic and linguistic barriers in the study methods and recruitment methods may cause researchers to conduct user studies locally. In addition, many papers did not report participant demographics, which could hinder the replication of the reported studies, leading to low reproducibility. To improve geographic diversity, we provide the suggestions including facilitate replication studies, address geographic and linguistic issues of study/recruitment methods, and facilitate research on the topics for non-WEIRD populations.
The moral may be that human factors and usability needs to be localized.
Improvements in Brute Force Attacks
New paper: “GPU Assisted Brute Force Cryptanalysis of GPRS, GSM, RFID, and TETRA: Brute Force Cryptanalysis of KASUMI, SPECK, and TEA3.”
Abstract: Key lengths in symmetric cryptography are determined with respect to the brute force attacks with current technology. While nowadays at least 128-bit keys are recommended, there are many standards and real-world applications that use shorter keys. In order to estimate the actual threat imposed by using those short keys, precise estimates for attacks are crucial.
In this work we provide optimized implementations of several widely used algorithms on GPUs, leading to interesting insights on the cost of brute force attacks on several real-word applications.
In particular, we optimize KASUMI (used in GPRS/GSM),SPECK (used in RFID communication), andTEA3 (used in TETRA). Our best optimizations allow us to try 235.72, 236.72, and 234.71 keys per second on a single RTX 4090 GPU. Those results improve upon previous results significantly, e.g. our KASUMI implementation is more than 15 times faster than the optimizations given in the CRYPTO’24 paper [ACC+24] improving the main results of that paper by the same factor.
With these optimizations, in order to break GPRS/GSM, RFID, and TETRA communications in a year, one needs around 11.22 billion, and 1.36 million RTX 4090GPUs, respectively.
For KASUMI, the time-memory trade-off attacks of [ACC+24] can be performed with142 RTX 4090 GPUs instead of 2400 RTX 3090 GPUs or, when the same amount of GPUs are used, their table creation time can be reduced to 20.6 days from 348 days,crucial improvements for real world cryptanalytic tasks.
Attacks always get better; they never get worse. None of these is practical yet, and they might never be. But there are certainly more optimizations to come.
EDITED TO ADD (4/14): One of the paper’s authors responds.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.