Former Uber CISO Appealing His Conviction

Joe Sullivan, Uber’s CEO during their 2016 data breach, is appealing his conviction. Prosecutors charged Sullivan, whom Uber hired as CISO after the 2014 breach, of withholding information about the 2016 incident from the FTC even as its investigators were scrutinizing the company’s data security and privacy practices. The government ... Read More

Security Vulnerability of Switzerland’s E-Voting System

Online voting is insecure, period. This doesn’t stop organizations and governments from using it. (And for low-stakes elections, it’s probably fine.) Switzerland—not low stakes—uses online voting for national elections. Andrew Appel explains why it’s a bad idea: Last year, I published a 5-part series about Switzerland’s e-voting system. Like any ... Read More

Coin Flips Are Biased

Experimental result: Many people have flipped coins but few have stopped to ponder the statistical and physical intricacies of the process. In a preregistered study we collected 350,757 coin flips to test the counterintuitive prediction from a physics model of human coin tossing developed by Persi Diaconis. The model asserts ... Read More

Hacking the High School Grading System

Interesting New York Times article about high-school students hacking the grading system. What’s not helping? The policies many school districts are adopting that make it nearly impossible for low-performing students to fail—they have a grading floor under them, they know it, and that allows them to game the system. Several ... Read More

Bounty to Recover NIST’s Elliptic Curve Seeds

This is a fun challenge: The NIST elliptic curves that power much of modern cryptography were generated in the late ’90s by hashing seeds provided by the NSA. How were the seeds generated? Rumor has it that they are in turn hashes of English sentences, but the person who picked ... Read More

Model Extraction Attack on Neural Networks

Adi Shamir et al. have a new model extraction attack on neural networks: Polynomial Time Cryptanalytic Extraction of Neural Network Models Abstract: Billions of dollars and countless GPU hours are currently spent on training Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) for a variety of tasks. Thus, it is essential to determine the ... Read More

AI Risks

There is no shortage of researchers and industry titans willing to warn us about the potential destructive power of artificial intelligence. Reading the headlines, one would hope that the rapid gains in AI technology have also brought forth a unifying realization of the risks—and the steps we need to take ... Read More

Political Disinformation and AI

Elections around the world are facing an evolving threat from foreign actors, one that involves artificial intelligence. Countries trying to influence each other’s elections entered a new era in 2016, when the Russians launched a series of social media disinformation campaigns targeting the US presidential election. Over the next seven ... Read More

On the Cybersecurity Jobs Shortage

In April, Cybersecurity Ventures reported on extreme cybersecurity job shortage: Global cybersecurity job vacancies grew by 350 percent, from one million openings in 2013 to 3.5 million in 2021, according to Cybersecurity Ventures. The number of unfilled jobs leveled off in 2022, and remains at 3.5 million in 2023, with ... Read More

Detecting AI-Generated Text

There are no reliable ways to distinguish text written by a human from text written by an large language model. OpenAI writes: Do AI detectors work? In short, no. While some (including OpenAI) have released tools that purport to detect AI-generated content, none of these have proven to reliably distinguish ... Read More