Bruce Schneier

Schneier on Security

Last Thursday, Rudy Giuliani, a Trump campaign lawyer, alleged a widespread voting conspiracy involving Venezuela, Cuba, and China. Another lawyer, Sidney Powell, argued that Mr. Trump won in a landslide, the entire election in swing states should be overturned and the legislatures should make sure that the electors are selected ... Read More

Wired has a detailed story about the ransomware attack on a Dusseldorf hospital, the one that resulted in an ambulance being redirected to a more distant hospital and the patient dying. The police wanted to prosecute the ransomware attackers for negligent homicide, but the details were more complicated: After a ... Read More

Last week I signed on to two joint letters about the security of the 2020 election. The first was as one of 59 election security experts, basically saying that while the election seems to have been both secure and accurate (voter suppression notwithstanding), we still need to work to secure ... Read More

Quanta magazine recently published a breathless article on indistinguishability obfuscation — calling it the “‘crown jewel’ of cryptography” — and saying that it had finally been achieved, based on a recently published paper. I want to add some caveats to the discussion. Basically, obfuscation makes a computer program “unintelligible” by ... Read More

Vice has a long article about how the US military buys commercial location data worldwide. The U.S. military is buying the granular movement data of people around the world, harvested from innocuous-seeming apps, Motherboard has learned. The most popular app among a group Motherboard analyzed connected to this sort of ... Read More

Over at Lawfare, Susan Hennessey has an excellent primer on how Trump loyalist Michael Ellis got to be the NSA General Counsel, over the objections of NSA Director Paul Nakasone, and what Biden can and should do about it. While important details remain unclear, media accounts include numerous indications of ... Read More

Blockchain voting is a spectacularly dumb idea for a whole bunch of reasons. I have generally quoted Matt Blaze: Why is blockchain voting a dumb idea? Glad you asked. For starters: It doesn’t solve any problems civil elections actually have. It’s basically incompatible with “software independence”, considered an essential property ... Read More

Earlier this year, I announced that I had joined Inrupt, the company commercializing Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid specification: The idea behind Solid is both simple and extraordinarily powerful. Your data lives in a pod that is controlled by you. Data generated by your things — your computer, your phone, your IoT ... Read More

Proctoring an online exam is hard. It’s hard to be sure that the student isn’t cheating, maybe by having reference materials at hand, or maybe by substituting someone else to take the exam for them. There are a variety of companies that provide online proctoring services, but they’re uniformly mediocre: ... Read More

Over at Lawfare: “2020 Is An Election Security Success Story (So Far).” What’s more, the voting itself was remarkably smooth. It was only a few months ago that professionals and analysts who monitor election administration were alarmed at how badly unprepared the country was for voting during a pandemic. Some ... Read More