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bruce_schneier_feedA comparison aimed at kids.
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bruce_schneier_feedThe Atlantic Council has published its second annual report: “Mythical Beasts: Diving into the depths of the global spyware market.”
Too much good detail to summarize, but here are two items:
First, the authors found that the number of US-based investors in spyware has notably increased in the past year, when compared with the sample size of the spyware market captured in the first Mythical Beasts project. In the first edition, the United States was the second-largest investor in the spyware market, following Israel. In that edition, twelve investors were observed to be domiciled within the United States—whereas in this second edition, twenty new US-based investors were observed investing in the spyware industry in 2024. This indicates a significant increase of US-based investments in spyware in 2024, catapulting the United States to being the largest investor in this sample of the spyware market. This is significant in scale, as US-based investment from 2023 to 2024 largely outpaced that of other major investing countries observed in the first dataset, including Italy, Israel, and the United Kingdom. It is also significant in the disparity it points to the visible enforcement gap between the flow of US dollars and US policy initiatives. Despite numerous US policy actions, such as the addition of spyware vendors on the Entity List, and the broader global leadership role that the United States has played through imposing sanctions and diplomatic engagement, US investments continue to fund the very entities that US policymakers are making an effort to combat.
Second, the authors elaborated on the central role that resellers and brokers play in the spyware market, while being a notably under-researched set of actors. These entities act as intermediaries, obscuring the connections between vendors, suppliers, and buyers. Oftentimes, intermediaries connect vendors to new regional markets. Their presence in the dataset is almost assuredly underrepresented given the opaque nature of brokers and resellers, making corporate structures and jurisdictional arbitrage more complex and challenging to disentangle. While their uptick in the second edition of the Mythical Beasts project may be the result of a wider, more extensive data-collection effort, there is less reporting on resellers and brokers, and these entities are not systematically understood. As observed in the first report, the activities of these suppliers and brokers represent a critical information gap for advocates of a more effective policy rooted in national security and human rights. These discoveries help bring into sharper focus the state of the spyware market and the wider cyber-proliferation space, and reaffirm the need to research and surface these actors that otherwise undermine the transparency and accountability efforts by state and non-state actors as they relate to the spyware market.
Really good work. Read the whole thing.
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bruce_schneier_feedThis is a nice piece of research: “Mind the Gap: Time-of-Check to Time-of-Use Vulnerabilities in LLM-Enabled Agents“.:
Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM)-enabled agents are rapidly emerging across a wide range of applications, but their deployment introduces vulnerabilities with security implications. While prior work has examined prompt-based attacks (e.g., prompt injection) and data-oriented threats (e.g., data exfiltration), time-of-check to time-of-use (TOCTOU) remain largely unexplored in this context. TOCTOU arises when an agent validates external state (e.g., a file or API response) that is later modified before use, enabling practical attacks such as malicious configuration swaps or payload injection. In this work, we present the first study of TOCTOU vulnerabilities in LLM-enabled agents. We introduce TOCTOU-Bench, a benchmark with 66 realistic user tasks designed to evaluate this class of vulnerabilities. As countermeasures, we adapt detection and mitigation techniques from systems security to this setting and propose prompt rewriting, state integrity monitoring, and tool-fusing. Our study highlights challenges unique to agentic workflows, where we achieve up to 25% detection accuracy using automated detection methods, a 3% decrease in vulnerable plan generation, and a 95% reduction in the attack window. When combining all three approaches, we reduce the TOCTOU vulnerabilities from an executed trajectory from 12% to 8%. Our findings open a new research direction at the intersection of AI safety and systems security.
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bruce_schneier_feedVulnerabilities in electronic safes that use Securam Prologic locks:
While both their techniques represent glaring security vulnerabilities, Omo says it’s the one that exploits a feature intended as a legitimate unlock method for locksmiths that’s the more widespread and dangerous. “This attack is something where, if you had a safe with this kind of lock, I could literally pull up the code right now with no specialized hardware, nothing,” Omo says. “All of a sudden, based on our testing, it seems like people can get into almost any Securam Prologic lock in the world.”
[…]
Omo and Rowley say they informed Securam about both their safe-opening techniques in spring of last year, but have until now kept their existence secret because of legal threats from the company. “We will refer this matter to our counsel for trade libel if you choose the route of public announcement or disclosure,” a Securam representative wrote to the two researchers ahead of last year’s Defcon, where they first planned to present their research.
Only after obtaining pro bono legal representation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Coders’ Rights Project did the pair decide to follow through with their plan to speak about Securam’s vulnerabilities at Defcon. Omo and Rowley say they’re even now being careful not to disclose enough technical detail to help others replicate their techniques, while still trying to offer a warning to safe owners about two different vulnerabilities that exist in many of their devices.
The company says that it plans on updating its locks by the end of the year, but have no plans to patch any locks already sold.
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mrissaSeriously, very excited, friends.
billroper - Mix Reduxbruce_schneier_feed - Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid vs. Blue Whaleranunculus - Electrical, Rainjames_davis_nicoll - Bad News From Alpha Centauri A…james_davis_nicoll - Sabrena Swept Away by Karuna Riazibruce_schneier_feed - Surveying the Global Spyware Marketbillroper - Push the Button, Max!james_davis_nicoll - Geodesic Dreams: The Best Short Fiction of Gardner Dozois by Gardner Dozoisbruce_schneier_feed - Time-of-Check Time-of-Use Attacks Against LLMsbillroper - Treading Waterselki - Extraction Zones and similar lingoranunculus - Water Updatejames_davis_nicoll - The Graveyard Apartment by Mariko Koikebruce_schneier_feed - Hacking Electronic Safesranunculus - Water. Sighbillroper - About That New Guitarjames_davis_nicoll - The Feast of Saint Janis & Ginungagap by Michael Swanwickmrissa - Coming soon to a page or e-reader near you!james_davis_nicoll - Five Artificially Layered Planets and World Citiesjames_davis_nicoll - Spread Me by Sarah Gaileymomijizukamorikrja
