Nice short article on the bobtail squid. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Blog moderation policy. Powered by WPeMatico
Month: August 2025
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 … Read More “I’m Spending the Year at the Munk School” »
Think of the Web as a digital territory with its own social contract. In 2014, Tim Berners-Lee called for a “Magna Carta for the Web” to restore the balance of power between individuals and institutions. This mirrors the original charter’s purpose: ensuring that those who occupy a territory have a meaningful stake in its governance. … Read More “AI Agents Need Data Integrity” »
Well, this is interesting: The auction, which will include other items related to cryptology, will be held Nov. 20. RR Auction, the company arranging the sale, estimates a winning bid between $300,000 and $500,000. Along with the original handwritten plain text of K4 and other papers related to the coding, Mr. Sanborn will also be … Read More “Jim Sanborn Is Auctioning Off the Solution to Part Four of the Kryptos Sculpture” »
In this input integrity attack against an AI system, researchers were able to fool AIOps tools: AIOps refers to the use of LLM-based agents to gather and analyze application telemetry, including system logs, performance metrics, traces, and alerts, to detect problems and then suggest or carry out corrective actions. The likes of Cisco have deployed … Read More “Subverting AIOps Systems Through Poisoned Input Data” »
A zero-day vulnerability in WinRAR is being exploited by at least two Russian criminal groups: The vulnerability seemed to have super Windows powers. It abused alternate data streams, a Windows feature that allows different ways of representing the same file path. The exploit abused that feature to trigger a previously unknown path traversal flaw that … Read More “Zero-Day Exploit in WinRAR File” »
Researchers have managed to eavesdrop on cell phone voice conversations by using radar to detect vibrations. It’s more a proof of concept than anything else. The radar detector is only ten feet away, the setup is stylized, and accuracy is poor. But it’s a start. Powered by WPeMatico
Here’s the story. The commenters on X (formerly Twitter) are unimpressed. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Blog moderation policy. Powered by WPeMatico
Porn sites are hiding code in .svg files: Unpacking the attack took work because much of the JavaScript in the .svg images was heavily obscured using a custom version of “JSFuck,” a technique that uses only a handful of character types to encode JavaScript into a camouflaged wall of text. Once decoded, the script causes … Read More “Trojans Embedded in .svg Files” »
Here’s an interesting story about a failure being introduced by LLM-written code. Specifically, the LLM was doing some code refactoring, and when it moved a chunk of code from one file to another it changed a “break” to a “continue.” That turned an error logging statement into an infinite loop, which crashed the system. This … Read More “LLM Coding Integrity Breach” »