There is a huge and ever-widening gap between the devices we use to make the web and the devices most people use to consume it. It’s also no secret that the average size of a website is huge, and it’s only going to get larger.

The iMessage PQ3 protocol is an end-to-end encrypted messaging protocol designed for exchanging data in long-lived sessions between two devices. It aims to provide classical and post-quantum confidentiality for forward secrecy and post-compromise secrecy, as well as classical authentication. Its initial authenticated key exchange is constructed from digital signatures plus elliptic curve Diffie–Hellman and post-quantum key exchanges; to derive per-message keys on an ongoing basis, it employs an adaptation of the Signal double ratchet that includes a post-quantum key encapsulation mechanism. This paper presents the cryptographic details of the PQ3 protocol and gives a reductionist security analysis by adapting the multi-stage key exchange security analysis of Signal by Cohn-Gordon et al. (J. Cryptology, 2020). The analysis shows that PQ3 provides confidentiality with forward secrecy and post-compromise security against both classical and quantum adversaries, in both the initial key exchange as well as the continuous rekeying phase of the protocol.

Git has been the de-facto version control system used by nearly every developer in the world for almost a decade now. While most of us know the basics, there are depths and hidden valleys of our Git tooling that even the most experienced of us may have never even heard of. Join Scott Chacon, a GitHub co-founder and the author of Pro Git, to dig into the hidden depths of obscure command line invocations to get more out of the amazing tool you use every day.

For the last 6 years my colleagues and I have been tracking the activities of the cyber-mercenaries we call Dark Caracal. In this time, we have observed them make a number of hilarious mistakes which have allowed us to gain crucial insights into their activities and victims. In this talk, we will discuss the story of Dark Caracal, the mistakes they have made, and how they have managed to remain effective despite quite possibly being the dumbest APT to ever exist.

Every once in a while I took a look at the various services I self-host and think to myself? Is hosting $X service by myself really worth the cost? What is the cost? Would paying someone to host said service be more cost efficient?
That got me thinking about, what are the costs of self hosting? Let’s talk about it.

This post is dedicated to the memory of Niklaus Wirth, a computing pioneer who passed away January 1st. In 1995 he wrote an influential article called “A Plea for Lean Software”, and in what follows, I try to make the same case nearly 30 years later, updated for today’s computing horrors.

The most important lesson to figure out is why it is taking so long to restore services. That will tell us how to prevent such a calamity in other vital national institutions.

I run my own Matrix homeserver that I share with friends and family. Ever since I started working for Element back in February of 2020, I've learned a lot more about the Matrix protocol and what's possible to do with it. During a conversation with a few privacy minded friends that use my HS (HomeServer), I pointed out that the admin of a homeserver has a lot of power over their accounts and that they as users explicitly trust the admin. In this post, I want to explore and document the ways a malicious admin can mess with the privacy of a Matrix account. Note: malicious admin in this case can also mean a hacked admin.

Logs are a vital component for maintaining application reliability, performance, and security. They serve as a source of information for developers, security teams, and other stakeholders to understand what has happened or gone wrong within an application. However, logs can also be used to compromise the security of an application by injecting malicious content.
In this presentation, we will explore how ANSI escape sequences can be used to inject, vandalize, and even weaponize logfiles of modern applications. We will revisit old terminal injection research and log tampering techniques from the 80-90s, and combine them with new features to create chaos and mischief in the modern cloud cli's, mobile, and feature-rich DevOps terminal emulators of today....

Recently I came across a puzzling fact: the International Criminal Court hashes electronic evidence with MD5, even though MD5 is badly broken. So, why are lawyers using broken, outdated technology? The answer involves the common law system, cultural isolation, and a single man named Don L. Lewis.

We conduct the first large-scale user study examining how users interact with an AI Code assistant to solve a variety of security related tasks across different programming languages. Overall, we find that participants who had access to an AI assistant based on OpenAI's codex-davinci-002 model wrote significantly less secure code than those without access. Additionally, participants with access to an AI assistant were more likely to believe they wrote secure code than those without access to the AI assistant. Furthermore, we find that participants who trusted the AI less and engaged more with the language and format of their prompts (e.g. re-phrasing, adjusting temperature) provided code with fewer security vulnerabilities. Finally, in order to better inform the design of future AI-based Code assistants, we provide an in-depth analysis of participants' language and interaction behavior, as well as release our user interface as an instrument to conduct similar studies in the future.

Sometimes, making particular security design decisions can have unexpected consequences. For security-critical software, such as password managers, this can easily lead to catastrophic failure: In this blog post, we show how Bitwarden’s Windows Hello implementation allowed us to remotely steal all credentials from the vault without knowing the password or requiring biometric authentication. When we discovered this during a penetration test it was so unexpected for us that we agreed with our client to publish a blog post about it and tell the story.

We've all been there: the trains you're servicing for a customer suddenly brick themselves and the manufacturer claims that's because you've interfered with a security system.

This talk will tell the story of a series of Polish EMUs (Electric Multiple Unit) that all refused to move a few days after arriving at an “unauthorized” service company. We'll go over how a train control system actually works, how we reverse-engineered one and what sort of magical “security” systems we actually found inside of it.

Reality sometimes is stranger than the wildest CTF task. Reality sometimes is running unlock.py on a dozen trains.

Imagine discovering a zero-click attack targeting Apple mobile devices of your colleagues and managing to capture all the stages of the attack. That’s exactly what happened to us! This led to the fixing of four zero-day vulnerabilities and discovering of a previously unknown and highly sophisticated spyware that had been around for years without anyone noticing. We call it Operation Triangulation. We've been teasing this story for almost six months, while thoroughly analyzing every stage of the attack. Now, for the first time, we're ready to tell you all about it. This is the story of the most sophisticated attack chain and spyware ever discovered by Kaspersky.

Searching the Internet for information sucks. We live in an age of information surplus. At any point in the internet there are an unimaginable number of things to read, watch, listen to, and play through. The average person's backlog of entertainment stretches for several lifetimes.

It is impossible to consume all of the information on the Internet. It was impossible even when the Internet was much smaller. Much, much smaller.

John Graham-Cumming wrote an article today complaining about how a computer system he was working with described his last name as having invalid characters. It of course does not, because anything someone tells you is their name is — by definition — an appropriate identifier for them. John was understandably vexed about this situation, and he has every right to be, because names are central to our identities, virtually by definition.

So, you’ve been invited to an unconference! Maybe you’re not entirely sure what that means (did the organizers misspell "conference"?), or maybe you’ve been to dozens of these before and you’re looking for some ideas for how to run an awesome session.

WebAuthn and FIDO2 promise a great future. Let's see if we can have it today.

It's possible!