SQL Injection Attack on Airport Security
Interesting vulnerability: …a special lane at airport security called Known Crewmember (KCM). KCM is a TSA program that allows pilots and flight attendants to bypass security screening, even when flying on domestic personal trips. The KCM process is fairly simple: the employee uses the dedicated lane and presents their KCM ... Read More
NIST Releases First Post-Quantum Encryption Algorithms
From the Federal Register: After three rounds of evaluation and analysis, NIST selected four algorithms it will standardize as a result of the PQC Standardization Process. The public-key encapsulation mechanism selected was CRYSTALS-KYBER, along with three digital signature schemes: CRYSTALS-Dilithium, FALCON, and SPHINCS+. These algorithms are part of three NIST ... Read More
On the Voynich Manuscript
Really interesting article on the ancient-manuscript scholars who are applying their techniques to the Voynich Manuscript. No one has been able to understand the writing yet, but there are some new understandings: Davis presented her findings at the medieval-studies conference and published them in 2020 in the journal Manuscript Studies ... Read More
On the Cyber Safety Review Board
When an airplane crashes, impartial investigatory bodies leap into action, empowered by law to unearth what happened and why. But there is no such empowered and impartial body to investigate CrowdStrike’s faulty update that recently unfolded, ensnarling banks, airlines, and emergency services to the tune of billions of dollars. We ... Read More
Providing Security Updates to Automobile Software
Auto manufacturers are just starting to realize the problems of supporting the software in older models: Today’s phones are able to receive updates six to eight years after their purchase date. Samsung and Google provide Android OS updates and security updates for seven years. Apple halts servicing products seven years ... Read More
Compromising the Secure Boot Process
This isn’t good: On Thursday, researchers from security firm Binarly revealed that Secure Boot is completely compromised on more than 200 device models sold by Acer, Dell, Gigabyte, Intel, and Supermicro. The cause: a cryptographic key underpinning Secure Boot on those models that was compromised in 2022. In a public ... Read More
The CrowdStrike Outage and Market-Driven Brittleness
Friday’s massive internet outage, caused by a mid-sized tech company called CrowdStrike, disrupted major airlines, hospitals, and banks. Nearly 7,000 flights were canceled. It took down 911 systems and factories, courthouses, and television stations. Tallying the total cost will take time. The outage affected more than 8.5 million Windows computers, ... Read More
Robot Dog Internet Jammer
Supposedly the DHS has these: The robot, called “NEO,” is a modified version of the “Quadruped Unmanned Ground Vehicle” (Q-UGV) sold to law enforcement by a company called Ghost Robotics. Benjamine Huffman, the director of DHS’s Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers (FLETC), told police at the 2024 Border Security Expo ... Read More
Hacking Scientific Citations
Some scholars are inflating their reference counts by sneaking them into metadata: Citations of scientific work abide by a standardized referencing system: Each reference explicitly mentions at least the title, authors’ names, publication year, journal or conference name, and page numbers of the cited publication. These details are stored as ... Read More
New Open SSH Vulnerability
It’s a serious one: The vulnerability, which is a signal handler race condition in OpenSSH’s server (sshd), allows unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) as root on glibc-based Linux systems; that presents a significant security risk. This race condition affects sshd in its default configuration. […] This vulnerability, if exploited, could ... Read More
