Month: November 2016

Fooling Facial Recognition Systems

Posted on By infossl
academicpapers, artificialintelligence, biometrics, facerecognition, Security technology

This is some interesting research. You can fool facial recognition systems by wearing glasses printed with elements of other peoples’ faces. Mahmood Sharif, Sruti Bhagavatula, Lujo Bauer, and Michael K. Reiter, “Accessorize to a Crime: Real and Stealthy Attacks on State-of-the-Art Face Recognition“: ABSTRACT: Machine learning is enabling a myriad innovations, including new algorithms for … Read More “Fooling Facial Recognition Systems” »

Regulation of the Internet of Things

Posted on By infossl
denialofservice, dns, economicsofsecurity, internetofthings, laws, Security technology, softwareliability

Late last month, popular websites like Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit and PayPal went down for most of a day. The distributed denial-of-service attack that caused the outages, and the vulnerabilities that made the attack possible, was as much a failure of market and policy as it was of technology. If we want to secure our increasingly … Read More “Regulation of the Internet of Things” »

Whistleblower Investigative Report on NSA Suite B Cryptography

Posted on By infossl
algorithms, cryptography, encryption, nsa, Security technology, whistleblowers

The NSA has been abandoning secret and proprietary cryptographic algorithms in favor of commercial public algorithms, generally known as “Suite B.” In 2010, an NSA employee filed some sort of whistleblower complaint, alleging that this move is both insecure and wasteful. The US DoD Inspector General investigated and wrote a report in 2011. The report … Read More “Whistleblower Investigative Report on NSA Suite B Cryptography” »

Self-Propagating Smart Light Bulb Worm

Posted on By infossl
academicpapers, aes, authentication, cryptography, encryption, internetofthings, malware, Security technology, sidechannelattacks

This is exactly the sort of Internet-of-Things attack that has me worried: “IoT Goes Nuclear: Creating a ZigBee Chain Reaction” by Eyal Ronen, Colin OFlynn, Adi Shamir and Achi-Or Weingarten. Abstract: Within the next few years, billions of IoT devices will densely populate our cities. In this paper we describe a new type of threat … Read More “Self-Propagating Smart Light Bulb Worm” »

Firefox Removing Battery Status API

Posted on By infossl
academicpapers, browsers, firefox, identification, linux, privacy, Security technology, tracking

Firefox is removing the battery status API, citing privacy concerns. Here’s the paper that described those concerns: Abstract. We highlight privacy risks associated with the HTML5 Battery Status API. We put special focus on its implementation in the Firefox browser. Our study shows that websites can discover the capacity of users’ batteries by exploiting the … Read More “Firefox Removing Battery Status API” »