Schneier on Security

  1. Someone named “Squid” seems to be a “West Country legend.”

    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.

  2. Younger Americans have soured on the second Donald Trump presidency, but they are not protesting it.

    Despite an unpopular Iran war and an even more unpopular Trump administration, college campus protests nationwide have gone silent. And at many schools, student activism is virtually nonexistent.

    This silence comes in the wake of a relentless Trump administration war on campus speech that has involved lawsuits, arrests, deportations and expulsions.

    Reports cite a range of complicated factors for the restraint, from apathy to technology-induced incapacity. But as...

  3. The 2025 Internet Crime Report was published a few weeks ago, but I only just saw it.
    Lots of interesting statistics.

    Press release. News articles.

  4. Not identifying people based on their use of Wi-Fi routers, but identifying people using Wi-Fi signals.

    This is accomplished through what is known as WiFi sensing, or the use of WiFi signals to infer information about a physical environment. When radio signals like WiFi travel through a space, they interact with the objects and people around them. Those signals can be reflected, scattered, or absorbed. By analyzing how the signal is expected to behave compared with how it is actually received, researchers can infer details about the surrounding environment...

  5. The South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organization (SPRFMO) needs to regulate squid fishing in the South Pacific.

    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.

  6. Crazy story:

    Until this past weekend, a contractor for the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) maintained a public GitHub repository that exposed credentials to several highly privileged AWS GovCloud accounts and a large number of internal CISA systems. Security experts said the public archive included files detailing how CISA builds, tests and deploys software internally, and that it represents one of the most egregious government data leaks in recent history.

    News article.

  7. A group used Anthropic’s Mythos AI model to help find a kernel memory corruption vulnerability and exploit on Apple’s M5.

    News article.

  8. Good report:

    Executive Summary: Let’s say you wanted to make sure that your AI is secure. Can you just maximize the security and privacy benchmark and call it a day? Nope, because benchmarks don’t actually work for measuring AI capabilities (even when they are NOT emergent systemic properties like security). So let’s take a step back: how do you measure security in the first place? Good question. Over the last 30 years, security engineering for software evolved from black box penetration testing, through whitebox code analysis and architectural risk analysis to de facto process-driven standards like the Building Security In Maturity Model (BSIMM). Software had a very deep impact on business operations, and it appears that AI is going to have an even deeper impact. Will a software security-like measurement move work for AI? Probably. In the meantime we can make real progress in AI security by cleaning up our WHAT piles and managing risk by identifying and applying good assurance processes. (Spoiler alert: no matter what we do, we still don’t get a security meter for AI, so we need to be extra vigilant about security.)...

  9. Not by name, but Laurie Anderson quotes me in one of the tracks of her new album:

    My favorite quote is from a cryptologist who said “If you think technology will solve your problems, you don’t understand technology and you don’t understand your problems.”

    Also in interviews:

    “Of course, it’s ridiculous, outrageous, blah, blah, blah,” Anderson says about the ad. ‘But, I mean, my favorite quote on this is from a cryptologist who said, ‘If you think technology will solve your problems, you don’t understand technology ­ and you don’t understand your problems.’ And I think I’m completely on board with that.”...

  10. It’s nasty, but it requires physical access to the computer:

    The exploit, named YellowKey, was published earlier this week by a researcher who goes by the alias Nightmare-Eclipse. It reliably bypasses default Windows 11 deployments of BitLocker, the full-volume encryption protection Microsoft provides to make disk contents off-limits to anyone without the decryption key, which is stored in a secured piece of hardware known as a trusted platform module (TPM). BitLocker is a mandatory protection for many organizations, including those that contract with governments...