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” »
This was written in 2004, but still holds true today. Powered by WPeMatico
A week ago Friday, someone took down numerous popular websites in a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against the domain name provider Dyn. DDoS attacks are neither new nor sophisticated. The attacker sends a massive amount of traffic, causing the victim’s system to slow to a crawl and eventually crash. There are more or less … Read More “Lessons From the Dyn DDoS Attack” »
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” »
For years, the DMCA has been used to stifle legitimate research into the security of embedded systems. Finally, the research exemption to the DMCA is in effect (for two years, but we can hope it’ll be extended forever). Powered by WPeMatico
A sperm whale has been sighted in Monterey Bay, hunting squid. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Powered by WPeMatico
New Atlas has a great three-part feature on the history of hacking as portrayed in films, including video clips. The 1980s. The 1990s. The 2000s. Powered by WPeMatico
Google’s new ways to violate your privacy and — more importantly — how to opt out. Powered by WPeMatico
Researchers have trained a neural network to encrypt its communications. In their experiment, computers were able to make their own form of encryption using machine learning, without being taught specific cryptographic algorithms. The encryption was very basic, especially compared to our current human-designed systems. Even so, it is still an interesting step for neural nets, … Read More “Teaching a Neural Network to Encrypt” »
Looks interesting. Finnish residents can take it for credit. Powered by WPeMatico
