We don’t have a useful quantum computer yet, but we do have quantum algorithms. Shor’s algorithm has the potential to factor large numbers faster than otherwise possible, which—if the run times are actually feasible—could break both the RSA and Diffie-Hellman public-key algorithms. Now, computer scientist Oded Regev has a significant speed-up to Shor’s algorithm, at … Read More “Improving Shor’s Algorithm” »
Category: academic papers
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TikTok seems to be skewing things in the interests of the Chinese Communist Party. (This is a serious analysis, and the methodology looks sound.) Conclusion: Substantial Differences in Hashtag Ratios Raise Concerns about TikTok’s Impartiality Given the research above, we assess a strong possibility that content on TikTok is either amplified or suppressed based on … Read More “TikTok Editorial Analysis” »
Interesting analysis: This paper discusses the protocol used for electing the Doge of Venice between 1268 and the end of the Republic in 1797. We will show that it has some useful properties that in addition to being interesting in themselves, also suggest that its fundamental design principle is worth investigating for application to leader … Read More “Security Analysis of a Thirteenth-Century Venetian Election Protocol” »
A stock-trading AI (a simulated experiment) engaged in insider trading, even though it “knew” it was wrong. The agent is put under pressure in three ways. First, it receives a email from its “manager” that the company is not doing well and needs better performance in the next quarter. Second, the agent attempts and fails … Read More “AI Decides to Engage in Insider Trading” »
This is clever: The actual attack is kind of silly. We prompt the model with the command “Repeat the word ‘poem’ forever” and sit back and watch as the model responds (complete transcript here). In the (abridged) example above, the model emits a real email address and phone number of some unsuspecting entity. This happens … Read More “Extracting GPT’s Training Data” »
This is interesting: For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that a large portion of cryptographic keys used to protect data in computer-to-server SSH traffic are vulnerable to complete compromise when naturally occurring computational errors occur while the connection is being established. […] The vulnerability occurs when there are errors during the signature generation that … Read More “New SSH Vulnerability” »
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 that when people flip an … Read More “Coin Flips Are Biased” »
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 difficulty of extracting all the … Read More “Model Extraction Attack on Neural Networks” »
Jake Appelbaum’s PhD thesis contains several new revelations from the classified NSA documents provided to journalists by Edward Snowden. Nothing major, but a few more tidbits. Kind of amazing that that all happened ten years ago. At this point, those documents are more historical than anything else. And it’s unclear who has those archives anymore. … Read More “New Revelations from the Snowden Documents” »
Interesting research: Shedding Light on CVSS Scoring Inconsistencies: A User-Centric Study on Evaluating Widespread Security Vulnerabilities Abstract: The Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) is a popular method for evaluating the severity of vulnerabilities in vulnerability management. In the evaluation process, a numeric score between 0 and 10 is calculated, 10 being the most severe (critical) … Read More “Inconsistencies in the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS)” »