Schneier on Security

  1. Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Washing Up on Cape Cod Beach

    Lots of articles about this.

    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.

  2. Details of Alan Turing’s Voice Encryption System

    Really interesting piece of cryptographic history:

    In November 2023, a large cache of his wartime papers—nicknamed the “Bayley papers”—was auctioned in London for almost half a million U.S. dollars. The previously unknown cache contains many sheets in Turing’s own handwriting, telling of his top-secret “Delilah” engineering project from 1943 to 1945. Delilah was Turing’s portable voice-encryption system, named after the biblical deceiver of men. There is also material written by Bayley, often in the form of notes he took while Turing was speaking. It is thanks to Bayley that the papers survived: He kept them until he died in 2020, 66 years after Turing passed away...

  3. Protecting Privacy in an AI Era

    Daniel Solove argues in the Wall Street Journal (alternate link) that giving people control of their personal data is not an effective way to regulate privacy in this era. Instead, we need to hold companies accountable for their actions, similar to what we do with food and drug companies. Measures such as rigorous data minimization, fiduciary duties, liability for negligent or reckless technological design, liability for algorithms that cause harm, and multi-stakeholder review of technologies will be far more effective.

    Paper.

  4. A Video Screen That Is Also a Camera

    Amazing:

    Researchers from ETH Zurich in Switzerland, however, managed to create a new type of pixel that can simultaneously do both. This hypercharged pixel, called a Fourier pixel, can generate and sense arbitrary light fields and tap into a pixel’s full potential for carrying information by manipulating light’s intensity, oscillation phases, and polarization. The team reported its findings in a paper published yesterday in Nature.

    We are one step closer to 1984 technology:

    The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment...

  5. Upcoming Speaking Engagements

    This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

  6. Vulnerability in FIFA’s Network

    FIFA’s network was vulnerable to anyone with even minimal access.

  7. AI Data Centers and the Concentration of Wealth

    This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Guardian.

    Opposition to AI data centers has emerged as a primary theme in US politics, one that—surprisingly—doesn’t fall along party lines. We applaud people coming together for constructive debate on any issue, and agree that communities need to evaluate whether any economic benefits these data centers bring is worth their costs. Still, we worry that a focus on data centers obscures the larger impacts of AI on people’s lives: the concentration of power of AI companies, and their widespread political and financial influence...

  8. Friday Squid Blogging: “Squidbleed” Vulnerability

    In a rare combined cybersecurity/squid post, a twenty-nine-year-old squid proxy bug can leak HTTP requests.

    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.

  9. AI Surveillance and Social Progress

    In the near future, AI-powered surveillance systems will be able to track everything we do in public, and much of what we do in private. And if we do something wrong—shoplift, litter, jaywalk, you name it—the system will notice, retain it, tie it to your official government record, communicate that fact to you, and provide real-time alerts to any relevant authorities… and maybe also to the general public.

    Think of these systems as automated speed cameras, but on steroids. Only they’ll enforce not just speed limits, but any other rule you can imagine. And you won’t receive a ticket weeks later by mail; you’ll be informed about and fined for your violation immediately...

  10. The Language of AI Could Change How Humans Speak

    Because of the way they are trained, large language models capture only a slice of human language. They’re trained on the written word, from textbooks to social media posts, and our speech as captured in movies and on television. These models have minimal access to the unscripted conversations we have face to face or voice to voice. This is the vast majority of speech, and a vital component of human culture.

    There’s a risk to this. The increased use of large language models means we humans will encounter much more AI-generated text. We humans, in turn, will begin to adopt the linguistic patterns and behaviors of these models. This will affect not just how we communicate with one another, but also how we...