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Schneier on Security

AIs Discovering Vulnerabilities

I’ve been writing about the possibility of AIs automatically discovering code vulnerabilities since at least 2018. This is an ongoing area of research: AIs doing source code scanning, AIs finding zero-days in the wild, and everything in between. The AIs aren’t very good at it yet, but they’re getting better.

Here’s some anecdotal data from this summer:

Since July 2024, ZeroPath is taking a novel approach combining deep program analysis with adversarial AI agents for validation. Our methodology has uncovered numerous critical vulnerabilities in production systems, including several that traditional Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tools were ill-equipped to find. This post provides a technical deep-dive into our research methodology and a living summary of the bugs found in popular open-source tools.

Expect lots of developments in this area over the next few years.

This is what I said in a recent interview:

Let’s stick with software. Imagine that we have an AI that finds software vulnerabilities. Yes, the attackers can use those AIs to break into systems. But the defenders can use the same AIs to find software vulnerabilities and then patch them. This capability, once it exists, will probably be built into the standard suite of software development tools. We can imagine a future where all the easily findable vulnerabilities (not all the vulnerabilities; there are lots of theoretical results about that) are removed in software before shipping.

When that day comes, all legacy code would be vulnerable. But all new code would be secure. And, eventually, those software vulnerabilities will be a thing of the past. In my head, some future programmer shakes their head and says, “Remember the early decades of this century when software was full of vulnerabilities? That’s before the AIs found them all. Wow, that was a crazy time.” We’re not there yet. We’re not even remotely there yet. But it’s a reasonable extrapolation.

EDITED TO ADD: And Google’s LLM just discovered an expolitable zero-day.

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Posted on November 5, 2024 at 7:08 AM • 7 Comments

Roger Grimes on Prioritizing Cybersecurity Advice

This is a good point:

Part of the problem is that we are constantly handed lists…list of required controls…list of things we are being asked to fix or improve…lists of new projects…lists of threats, and so on, that are not ranked for risks. For example, we are often given a cybersecurity guideline (e.g., PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOX, NIST, etc.) with hundreds of recommendations. They are all great recommendations, which if followed, will reduce risk in your environment.

What they do not tell you is which of the recommended things will have the most impact on best reducing risk in your environment. They do not tell you that one, two or three of these things…among the hundreds that have been given to you, will reduce more risk than all the others.

[…]

The solution?

Here is one big one: Do not use or rely on un-risk-ranked lists. Require any list of controls, threats, defenses, solutions to be risk-ranked according to how much actual risk they will reduce in the current environment if implemented.

[…]

This specific CISA document has at least 21 main recommendations, many of which lead to two or more other more specific recommendations. Overall, it has several dozen recommendations, each of which individually will likely take weeks to months to fulfill in any environment if not already accomplished. Any person following this document is…rightly…going to be expected to evaluate and implement all those recommendations. And doing so will absolutely reduce risk.

The catch is: There are two recommendations that WILL DO MORE THAN ALL THE REST ADDED TOGETHER TO REDUCE CYBERSECURITY RISK most efficiently: patching and using multifactor authentication (MFA). Patching is listed third. MFA is listed eighth. And there is nothing to indicate their ability to significantly reduce cybersecurity risk as compared to the other recommendations. Two of these things are not like the other, but how is anyone reading the document supposed to know that patching and using MFA really matter more than all the rest?

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Posted on October 31, 2024 at 11:43 AM • 11 Comments

Tracking World Leaders Using Strava

Way back in 2018, people noticed that you could find secret military bases using data published by the Strava fitness app. Soldiers and other military personal were using them to track their runs, and you could look at the public data and find places where there should be no people running.

Six years later, the problem remains. Le Monde has reported that the same Strava data can be used to track the movements of world leaders. They don’t wear the tracking device, but many of their bodyguards do.

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Posted on October 31, 2024 at 11:16 AM • 9 Comments

Simson Garfinkel on Spooky Cryptographic Action at a Distance

Excellent read. One example:

Consider the case of basic public key cryptography, in which a person’s public and private key are created together in a single operation. These two keys are entangled, not with quantum physics, but with math.

When I create a virtual machine server in the Amazon cloud, I am prompted for an RSA public key that will be used to control access to the machine. Typically, I create the public and private keypair on my laptop and upload the public key to Amazon, which bakes my public key into the server’s administrator account. My laptop and that remove server are thus entangled, in that the only way to log into the server is using the key on my laptop. And because that administrator account can do anything to that server­—read the sensitivity data, hack the web server to install malware on people who visit its web pages, or anything else I might care to do­—the private key on my laptop represents a security risk for that server.

Here’s why it’s impossible to evaluate a server and know if it is secure: as long that private key exists on my laptop, that server has a vulnerability. But if I delete that private key, the vulnerability goes away. By deleting the data, I have removed a security risk from the server and its security has increased. This is true entanglement! And it is spooky: not a single bit has changed on the server, yet it is more secure.

Read it all.

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Posted on October 30, 2024 at 10:48 AM • 19 Comments

Watermark for LLM-Generated Text

Researchers at Google have developed a watermark for LLM-generated text. The basics are pretty obvious: the LLM chooses between tokens partly based on a cryptographic key, and someone with knowledge of the key can detect those choices. What makes this hard is (1) how much text is required for the watermark to work, and (2) how robust the watermark is to post-generation editing. Google’s version looks pretty good: it’s detectable in text as small as 200 tokens.

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Posted on October 25, 2024 at 9:56 AM • 10 Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.