Schneier on Security

Researchers set up a fake start-up company to study fraudulent North Korean IT workers.

Interesting research: “ AI Models Can Provably Hide Arbitrary Capabilities ” Abstract: Capability evaluations aim to surface dangerous model behaviors before deployment, but their reliability depends on the assumption that hidden capabilities can be elicited. We show this assumption does not hold under adversarial…

Interesting research : TL;DR: Chinese AI models now sit inside Western products, and some carry geopolitical triggers: tell the model who the code is for, and the security of what it writes changes. For the first time, we showed that this vulnerability lives in the model’s weights, and that removing the model’s CCP…

This article in Nature argues that it’s due to an overfishing of predators and warming sea temperatures. 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.

The Indian CA eMudhra Limited has eight TLS certificates with laughably weak private keys : The compromised eMudhra keys were defective at a level that’s challenging the imagination of many of the engineers studying the incident. A normal size for a NIST P-384 elliptic curve cryptography private key contains roughly…

PHP maintainers have released fixes for two critical vulnerabilities: PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35 fix two critical vulnerabilities that can allow unauthenticated remote code execution. All PHP users are strongly encouraged to update immediately. Who is at risk: all PHP installations serving web requests,…

There’s a new archive of all the papers from twenty-five years of the Workshop on Economics and Information Security (WEIS). Really nice resource. It’s fun to reread my 2002 essay on the economics of information security.

Justin.sh is reporting on a confidential Cellebrite document that has been leaked to him: Cellebrite calls it Advanced Unlocks (AU from here on), not to be confused with the “advanced unlocking services” they’ve marketed for years. A press release from earlier this year confirms AU is a new product for 2026. […]…

Interesting research : Abstract : Vision-language models (VLMs) can solve visual CAPTCHAs without task-specific training, but the agents built on them approach every challenge from scratch. For such an agent, the hundredth instance of a familiar puzzle costs as much time and compute as the first. Specialized detectors…

New research shows that squid lived all around the globe even before the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction event. 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.