More Prompt||GTFO
The next three in this series on online events highlighting interesting uses of AI in cybersecurity are online: #4, #5, and #6. Well worth watching.
Entries Tagged "cybersecurity"
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A Cybersecurity Merit Badge
Scouting America (formerly known as Boy Scouts) has a new badge in cybersecurity. There’s an image in the article; it looks good.
I want one.
Apple’s New Memory Integrity Enforcement
Apple has introduced a new hardware/software security feature in the iPhone 17: “Memory Integrity Enforcement,” targeting the memory safety vulnerabilities that spyware products like Pegasus tend to use to get unauthorized system access. From Wired:
In recent years, a movement has been steadily growing across the global tech industry to address a ubiquitous and insidious type of bugs known as memory-safety vulnerabilities. A computer’s memory is a shared resource among all programs, and memory safety issues crop up when software can pull data that should be off limits from a computer’s memory or manipulate data in memory that shouldn’t be accessible to the program. When developers—even experienced and security-conscious developers—write software in ubiquitous, historic programming languages, like C and C++, it’s easy to make mistakes that lead to memory safety vulnerabilities. That’s why proactive tools like special programming languages have been proliferating with the goal of making it structurally impossible for software to contain these vulnerabilities, rather than attempting to avoid introducing them or catch all of them.
[…]
With memory-unsafe programming languages underlying so much of the world’s collective code base, Apple’s Security Engineering and Architecture team felt that putting memory safety mechanisms at the heart of Apple’s chips could be a deus ex machina for a seemingly intractable problem. The group built on a specification known as Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) released in 2019 by the chipmaker Arm. The idea was to essentially password protect every memory allocation in hardware so that future requests to access that region of memory are only granted by the system if the request includes the right secret.
Arm developed MTE as a tool to help developers find and fix memory corruption bugs. If the system receives a memory access request without passing the secret check, the app will crash and the system will log the sequence of events for developers to review. Apple’s engineers wondered whether MTE could run all the time rather than just being used as a debugging tool, and the group worked with Arm to release a version of the specification for this purpose in 2022 called Enhanced Memory Tagging Extension.
To make all of this a constant, real-time defense against exploitation of memory safety vulnerabilities, Apple spent years architecting the protection deeply within its chips so the feature could be on all the time for users without sacrificing overall processor and memory performance. In other words, you can see how generating and attaching secrets to every memory allocation and then demanding that programs manage and produce these secrets for every memory request could dent performance. But Apple says that it has been able to thread the needle.
I’m Spending the Year at the Munk School
This academic year, I am taking a sabbatical from the Kennedy School and Harvard University. (It’s not a real sabbatical—I’m just an adjunct—but it’s the same idea.) I will be spending the Fall 2025 and Spring 2026 semesters at the Munk School at the University of Toronto.
I will be organizing a reading group on AI security in the fall. I will be teaching my cybersecurity policy class in the Spring. I will be working with Citizen Lab, the Law School, and the Schwartz Reisman Institute. And I will be enjoying all the multicultural offerings of Toronto.
It’s all pretty exciting.
AI Applications in Cybersecurity
There is a really great series of online events highlighting cool uses of AI in cybersecurity, titled Prompt||GTFO. Videos from the first three events are online. And here’s where to register to attend, or participate, in the fourth.
Some really great stuff here.
House of Representatives Bans WhatsApp
Reuters is reporting that the US House of Representatives has banned WhatsApp on all employee devices:
The notice said the “Office of Cybersecurity has deemed WhatsApp a high risk to users due to the lack of transparency in how it protects user data, absence of stored data encryption, and potential security risks involved with its use.”
TechCrunch has more commentary, but no more information.
Google’s Advanced Protection Now on Android
Google has extended its Advanced Protection features to Android devices. It’s not for everybody, but something to be considered by high-risk users.
Wired article, behind a paywall.
Android Improves Its Security
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.
CVE Program Almost Unfunded
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.
Sasha Romanosky, senior policy researcher at the Rand Corporation, branded the end to the CVE program as “tragic,” a sentiment echoed by many cybersecurity and CVE experts reached for comment.
“CVE naming and assignment to software packages and versions are the foundation upon which the software vulnerability ecosystem is based,” Romanosky said. “Without it, we can’t track newly discovered vulnerabilities. We can’t score their severity or predict their exploitation. And we certainly wouldn’t be able to make the best decisions regarding patching them.”
Ben Edwards, principal research scientist at Bitsight, told CSO, “My reaction is sadness and disappointment. This is a valuable resource that should absolutely be funded, and not renewing the contract is a mistake.”
He added “I am hopeful any interruption is brief and that if the contract fails to be renewed, other stakeholders within the ecosystem can pick up where MITRE left off. The federated framework and openness of the system make this possible, but it’ll be a rocky road if operations do need to shift to another entity.”
More similar quotes in the article.
My guess is that we will somehow figure out how to transition this program to continue without the US government. It’s too important to be at risk.
EDITED TO ADD: Another good article.
Arguing Against CALEA
At a Congressional hearing earlier this week, Matt Blaze made the point that CALEA, the 1994 law that forces telecoms to make phone calls wiretappable, is outdated in today’s threat environment and should be rethought:
In other words, while the legally-mandated CALEA capability requirements have changed little over the last three decades, the infrastructure that must implement and protect it has changed radically. This has greatly expanded the “attack surface” that must be defended to prevent unauthorized wiretaps, especially at scale. The job of the illegal eavesdropper has gotten significantly easier, with many more options and opportunities for them to exploit. Compromising our telecommunications infrastructure is now little different from performing any other kind of computer intrusion or data breach, a well-known and endemic cybersecurity problem. To put it bluntly, something like Salt Typhoon was inevitable, and will likely happen again unless significant changes are made.
This is the access that the Chinese threat actor Salt Typhoon used to spy on Americans:
The Wall Street Journal first reported Friday that a Chinese government hacking group dubbed Salt Typhoon broke into three of the largest U.S. internet providers, including AT&T, Lumen (formerly CenturyLink), and Verizon, to access systems they use for facilitating customer data to law enforcement and governments. The hacks reportedly may have resulted in the “vast collection of internet traffic”; from the telecom and internet giants. CNN and The Washington Post also confirmed the intrusions and that the U.S. government’s investigation is in its early stages.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.