Field notes from the edge.
What our engineers learned this week. Hands-on technical deep-dives, postmortems, and strategy frameworks.
AI Vulnerability Finding
A comment : 3% of ‘critical’ software security bugs, in all of recorded history, have been found in the last month. This is on pace to find another ~100,000 bugs this year alone, adding ~26% more vulnerabilities to the all time total Do you realize how fucking insane that is? Yes. It is a new world out there.
Friday Squid Blogging: Bigfin Squid Off California Coast
Neat video : The sighting, announced September 2, marks the first time anyone has spotted a live bigfin squid, which belongs to the Magnapinna genus, in the northeastern Pacific Ocean. 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.
Bloatware in Aftermarket Auto Parts
This story is interesting: One Civic owner purchased a cheap aftermarket head unit off Amazon, and decided to have Claude work its magic on it, like it would a smart TV. What was reportedly discovered isn’t surprising, but is worth knowing about. Among the pre-installed bloatware—or spyware, if you’re being less charitable—was a voice assistant equipped with WebView, an Andro
Studying Fraudulent North Korean IT Workers
Researchers set up a fake start-up company to study fraudulent North Korean IT workers.
Hiding Capabilities in AI Models
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 conditions by constructing backdoor attacks that embed encrypted
Bias in Qwen3-Coder Model
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 alignment removes it. One word tilts the code against Americans
Friday Squid Blogging: Increasing Squid Populations
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.
Compromised TLS Certificates
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 384 bits of entropy, a size allowing almost 2 384 , or a numbe
New Serious PHP Vulnerabilities Released and Patched
PHP maintainers have released 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, including PHP-FPM, Apache with mod_php, php-cgi, FrankenPHP and LiteSpeed.
Workshop on Economics and Information Security (WEIS) Archive
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.
Possible new Cellebrite iPhone Radio Zero-Day
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. […] According to Cellebrite, AU: is a “next-generation AFU vector that
Training AIs to Solve CAPTCHAs
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 invert the trade-off, answering in milliseconds but only for
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Before the Chicxulub Meteor Impact
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.
Backdooring Open-Weight AI Models
This is a problem: Any open model whose weights have been edited can carry a backdoor, whether it’s a task-specific fine-tune, a merged adapter or an abliterated build. We have abliterated models in the title because it’s the most popular reason people download modified weights without verifying what’s inside. Abliteration is a cheap fine-tune that takes away a model’s ability
Measuring Human Cryptanalysis Effort
Matthew Green has a new site that tries to estimate the number of cryptanalyst-hours that have been spent analyzing different public-key algorithms: Abstract: We estimate how much public cryptanalysis each public-key assumption has received, using the literature itself as the instrument. From roughly sixteen thousand candidate papers we classify cryptanalytic work on ECDLP, str
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at ATTENTION: Democracy, Rebuilt in Montreal, Canada. The event runs October 21–23, 2026, and my talk is on Wednesday, October 21. I’m speaking at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, at 5 PM ET on October 22, 2026. I’m speaking at [un]prompted in San Francisco, California. The even
The Future of AI Cryptanalysis
Matthew Green has been writing a rather pessimistic series of posts about the potential for AI systems to vastly outperform humans in cryptanalysis of both symmetric and public-key ciphers. I am more optimistic than he is. That is, I have stronger faith in the over-engineering cryptographers tend to do. I am trying to write this up in more detail.
Cyberattack on Connected Fridges in France
Another IoT cyberattack , this one in France: Hackers gained control of the software that regulates the temperatures of the refrigeration units, forcing some to warm to 50C (120F) overnight, according to one supermarket chain affected. […] Normally, supermarket freezers go through a short period of defrosting overnight, in which temperatures rise slightly. But the hackers order
FBI Arrests Suspect in FBI-Hacking Case
In September, hackers from a group called ShinyHunters announced that they stole a trove of FBI data about its own agents. It was an intelligence disaster . Last week, the FBI arrested (alternate link ) someone associated with that crime.