Security Analysis of Apple’s “Find My…” Protocol
Interesting research: “Who Can Find My Devices? Security and Privacy of Apple’s Crowd-Sourced Bluetooth Location Tracking System“: Abstract: Overnight, Apple has turned its hundreds-of-million-device ecosystem into the world’s largest crowd-sourced location tracking network called offline finding (OF). OF leverages online finder devices to detect the presence of missing offline devices ... Read More
Friday Squid Blogging: On SQUIDS
A good tutorial: But we can go beyond the polarization of electrons and really leverage the electron waviness. By interleaving thin layers of superconducting and normal materials, we can make the quantum electronic equivalents of transistors and diodes such as Superconducting Tunnel Junctions (SJTs) and Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices (affectionately ... Read More
Metadata Left in Security Agency PDFs
Really interesting research: “Exploitation and Sanitization of Hidden Data in PDF Files” Abstract: Organizations publish and share more and more electronic documents like PDF files. Unfortunately, most organizations are unaware that these documents can compromise sensitive information like authors names, details on the information system and architecture. All these information ... Read More
More on the Chinese Zero-Day Microsoft Exchange Hack
Nick Weaver has an excellent post on the Microsoft Exchange hack: The investigative journalist Brian Krebs has produced a handy timeline of events and a few things stand out from the chronology. The attacker was first detected by one group on Jan. 5 and another on Jan. 6, and Microsoft ... Read More
Hacking Digitally Signed PDF Files
Interesting paper: “Shadow Attacks: Hiding and Replacing Content in Signed PDFs“: Abstract: Digitally signed PDFs are used in contracts and invoices to guarantee the authenticity and integrity of their content. A user opening a signed PDF expects to see a warning in case of any modification. In 2019, Mladenov et ... Read More
Mysterious Macintosh Malware
This is weird: Once an hour, infected Macs check a control server to see if there are any new commands the malware should run or binaries to execute. So far, however, researchers have yet to observe delivery of any payload on any of the infected 30,000 machines, leaving the malware’s ... Read More
National Security Risks of Late-Stage Capitalism
Early in 2020, cyberspace attackers apparently working for the Russian government compromised a piece of widely used network management software made by a company called SolarWinds. The hack gave the attackers access to the computer networks of some 18,000 of SolarWinds’s customers, including US government agencies such as the Homeland ... Read More
The Problem with Treating Data as a Commodity
Excellent Brookings paper: “Why data ownership is the wrong approach to protecting privacy.” From the introduction: Treating data like it is property fails to recognize either the value that varieties of personal information serve or the abiding interest that individuals have in their personal information even if they choose to ... Read More
Dependency Confusion: Another Supply-Chain Vulnerability
Alex Birsan writes about being able to install malware into proprietary corporate software by naming the code files to be identical to internal corporate code files. From a ZDNet article: Today, developers at small or large companies use package managers to download and import libraries that are then assembled together ... Read More
GPS Vulnerabilities
Really good op-ed in the New York Times about how vulnerable the GPS system is to interference, spoofing, and jamming — and potential alternatives. The 2018 National Defense Authorization Act included funding for the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Transportation to jointly conduct demonstrations of various alternatives to GPS, ... Read More
