Month: March 2025

The Signal Chat Leak and the NSA

Posted on By infossl
defense, Department of Defense, Security technology, signal, Uncategorized, vulnerabilities

US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who started the now-infamous group chat coordinating a US attack against the Yemen-based Houthis on March 15, is seemingly now suggesting that the secure messaging service Signal has security vulnerabilities. “I didn’t see this loser in the group,” Waltz told Fox News about Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, whom Waltz invited to the chat. … Read More “The Signal Chat Leak and the NSA” »

AIs as Trusted Third Parties

Posted on By infossl
academic papers, AI, cryptography, machine learning, Security technology, trust, Uncategorized

This is a truly fascinating paper: “Trusted Machine Learning Models Unlock Private Inference for Problems Currently Infeasible with Cryptography.” The basic idea is that AIs can act as trusted third parties: Abstract: We often interact with untrusted parties. Prioritization of privacy can limit the effectiveness of these interactions, as achieving certain goals necessitates sharing private … Read More “AIs as Trusted Third Parties” »

AI Data Poisoning

Posted on By infossl
AI, botnets, Security technology, spoofing, Uncategorized

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 … Read More “AI Data Poisoning” »

Report on Paragon Spyware

Posted on By infossl
israel, reports, Security technology, spyware, Uncategorized

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 … Read More “Report on Paragon Spyware” »

More Countries are Demanding Backdoors to Encrypted Apps

Posted on By infossl
backdoors, encryption, france, Security technology, sweden, Uncategorized

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.” Powered by WPeMatico

Friday Squid Blogging: A New Explanation of Squid Camouflage

Posted on By infossl
academic papers, Security technology, squid, Uncategorized

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 … Read More “Friday Squid Blogging: A New Explanation of Squid Camouflage” »

My Writings Are in the LibGen AI Training Corpus

Posted on By infossl
AI, Security technology, Uncategorized

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 … Read More “My Writings Are in the LibGen AI Training Corpus” »