Bruce Schneier

Schneier on Security

The Army is developing a new electronic warfare pod capable of being put on drones and on trucks. ...the Silent Crow pod is now the leading contender for the flying flagship of the Army's rebuilt electronic warfare force. Army EW was largely disbanded after the Cold War, except for short-range ... Read More

The attack requires physical access to the computer, but it's pretty devastating: On Thunderbolt-enabled Windows or Linux PCs manufactured before 2019, his technique can bypass the login screen of a sleeping or locked computer -- and even its hard disk encryption -- to gain full access to the computer's data ... Read More

The California Consumer Privacy Act is a lesson in missed opportunities. It was passed in haste, to stop a ballot initiative that would have been even more restrictive: In September 2017, Alastair Mactaggart and Mary Ross proposed a statewide ballot initiative entitled the "California Consumer Privacy Act." Ballot initiatives are ... Read More

This is a good explanation of an iOS bug that allowed someone to break out of the application sandbox. A summary: What a crazy bug, and Siguza's explanation is very cogent. Basically, it comes down to this: XML is terrible. iOS uses XML for Plists, and Plists are used everywhere ... Read More

Interesting story of malware hidden in Google Apps. This particular campaign is tied to the government of Vietnam. At a remote virtual version of its annual Security Analyst Summit, researchers from the Russian security firm Kaspersky today plan to present research about a hacking campaign they call PhantomLance, in which ... Read More

I was quoted in BuzzFeed: "My problem with contact tracing apps is that they have absolutely no value," Bruce Schneier, a privacy expert and fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, told BuzzFeed News. "I'm not even talking about the privacy concerns, I mean ... Read More

The NSA just published a survey of video conferencing apps. So did Mozilla. Zoom is on the good list, with some caveats. The company has done a lot of work addressing previous security concerns. It still has a bit to go on end-to-end encryption. Matthew Green looked at this. Zoom ... Read More

MIT researchers have built a system that fools natural-language processing systems by swapping words with synonyms: The software, developed by a team at MIT, looks for the words in a sentence that are most important to an NLP classifier and replaces them with a synonym that a human would find ... Read More

Instacart is taking legal action against bots that automatically place orders: Before it closed, to use Cartdash users first selected what items they want from Instacart as normal. Once that was done, they had to provide Cartdash with their Instacart email address, password, mobile number, tip amount, and whether they ... Read More

This one is from the Netherlands. It seems to be clever cryptanalysis rather than a backdoor. The Dutch intelligence service has been able to read encrypted communications from dozens of countries since the late 1970s thanks to a microchip, according to research by de Volkskrant on Thursday. The Netherlands could ... Read More