This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking and signing books at the Cambridge Public Library on October 22, 2025 at 6 PM ET. The event is sponsored by Harvard Bookstore. I’m…
Category: Schneier on Security
New Cryptanalysis of the Fiat-Shamir Protocol
A couple of months ago, a new paper demonstrated some new attacks against the Fiat-Shamir transformation. Quanta published a good article that explains the results. This is a pretty exciting paper from a theoretical perspective, but I don’t see it…
Signed Copies of Rewiring Democracy
When I announced my latest book last week, I forgot to mention that you can pre-order a signed copy here. I will ship the books the week of 10/20, when it is published. This article has been indexed from Schneier…
AI in Government
Just a few months after Elon Musk’s retreat from his unofficial role leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), we have a clearer picture of his vision of government powered by artificial intelligence, and it has a lot more to…
Friday Squid Blogging: The Origin and Propagation of Squid
New research (paywalled): Editor’s summary: Cephalopods are one of the most successful marine invertebrates in modern oceans, and they have a 500-million-year-old history. However, we know very little about their evolution because soft-bodied animals rarely fossilize. Ikegami et al. developed…
GPT-4o-mini Falls for Psychological Manipulation
Interesting experiment: To design their experiment, the University of Pennsylvania researchers tested 2024’s GPT-4o-mini model on two requests that it should ideally refuse: calling the user a jerk and giving directions for how to synthesize lidocaine. The researchers created experimental…
Generative AI as a Cybercrime Assistant
Anthropic reports on a Claude user: We recently disrupted a sophisticated cybercriminal that used Claude Code to commit large-scale theft and extortion of personal data. The actor targeted at least 17 distinct organizations, including in healthcare, the emergency services, and…
Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks Against LLM Assistants
Really good research on practical attacks against LLM agents. “Invitation Is All You Need! Promptware Attacks Against LLM-Powered Assistants in Production Are Practical and Dangerous” Abstract: The growing integration of LLMs into applications has introduced new security risks, notably known…
1965 Cryptanalysis Training Workbook Released by the NSA
In the early 1960s, National Security Agency cryptanalyst and cryptanalysis instructor Lambros D. Callimahos coined the term “Stethoscope” to describe a diagnostic computer program used to unravel the internal structure of pre-computer ciphertexts. The term appears in the newly declassified…
Friday Squid Blogging: Catching Humboldt Squid
First-person account of someone accidentally catching several Humboldt squid on a fishing line. No photos, though. 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…
Baggage Tag Scam
I just heard about this: There’s a travel scam warning going around the internet right now: You should keep your baggage tags on your bags until you get home, then shred them, because scammers are using luggage tags to file…
The UK May Be Dropping Its Backdoor Mandate
The US Director of National Intelligence is reporting that the UK government is dropping its backdoor mandate against the Apple iPhone. For now, at least, assuming that Tulsi Gabbard is reporting this accurately. This article has been indexed from Schneier…
We Are Still Unable to Secure LLMs from Malicious Inputs
Nice indirect prompt injection attack: Bargury’s attack starts with a poisoned document, which is shared to a potential victim’s Google Drive. (Bargury says a victim could have also uploaded a compromised file to their own account.) It looks like an…
Encryption Backdoor in Military/Police Radios
I wrote about this in 2023. Here’s the story: Three Dutch security analysts discovered the vulnerabilities—five in total—in a European radio standard called TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio), which is used in radios made by Motorola, Damm, Hytera, and others. The…
Poor Password Choices
Look at this: McDonald’s chose the password “123456” for a major corporate system. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Poor Password Choices
AI Agents Need Data Integrity
Think of the Web as a digital territory with its own social contract. In 2014, Tim Berners-Lee called for a “Magna Carta for the Web” to restore the balance of power between individuals and institutions. This mirrors the original charter’s…
Trojans Embedded in .svg Files
Porn sites are hiding code in .svg files: Unpacking the attack took work because much of the JavaScript in the .svg images was heavily obscured using a custom version of “JSFuck,” a technique that uses only a handful of character…
LLM Coding Integrity Breach
Here’s an interesting story about a failure being introduced by LLM-written code. Specifically, the LLM was doing some code refactoring, and when it moved a chunk of code from one file to another it changed a “break” to a “continue.”…
AI Applications in Cybersecurity
There is a really great series of online events highlighting cool uses of AI in cybersecurity, titled Prompt||GTFO. Videos from the first three events are online. And here’s where to register to attend, or participate, in the fourth. Some really…
Friday Squid Blogging: New Vulnerability in Squid HTTP Proxy Server
In a rare squid/security combined post, a new vulnerability was discovered in the Squid HTTP proxy server. This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Friday Squid Blogging: New Vulnerability in Squid HTTP Proxy Server