The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has released a report titled "Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications: Readiness of V2V Technology for Application." It's very long, and mostly not interesting to me, but there are security concerns sprinkled throughout: both authentication to ensure that all the communications are accurate and can't be spoofed, and privacy to ensure that the communications can't be used...

Months after it was found in August, scientists have dissected a colossal squid. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered....

Apple claims that they can no longer unlock iPhones, even if the police show up with a warrant. Of course they still have access to everything in iCloud, but it's a start....

Earlier this month, there were a bunch of stories about fake cell phone towers discovered around the US These seems to be ISMI catchers, like Harris Corporation's Stingray, and are used to capture location information and potentially phone calls, text messages, and smart-phone Internet traffic. A couple of days ago, the Washington Post ran a story about fake cell phone...

If there's anything that confuses wannabe cryptographers, it's one-time pads....

In 2008 Yahoo fought the NSA to avoid becoming part of the PRISM program. They eventually lost their court battle, and at one point were threatened with a $250,000 a day fine if they continued to resist. I am continually amazed at the extent of the government coercion....

According to court documents, Dread Pirate Roberts was identified because a CAPTCHA service used on the Silk Road login page leaked the users' true location....

What's interesting about this story is not that the cell phone system can track your location worldwide. That makes sense; the system has to know where you are. What's interesting about this story is that anyone can do it. Cyber-weapons arms manufacturers are selling the capability to governments worldwide, and hackers have demonstrated the capability....

New Zealand is spying on its citizens. Edward Snowden weighs in personally. The NSA and GCHQ are mapping the entire Internet, including hacking into Deutsche Telekom....

Good article on the insecurity of SHA-1 and the need to replace it sooner rather than later....

A 200-pound dead giant squid was found near the coast of Matagorda, Texas. This is only the third giant squid ever found in the Gulf of Mexico. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered....

Since the beginning, data privacy regulation focused on collection, storage, and use. You can see it in the OECD Privacy Framework from 1980 (see also this proposed update). Recently, there has been concerted effort to focus all potential regulation on data use, completely ignoring data collection. Microsoft's Craig Mundie argues this. So does the PCAST report. And the World Economic...

Aza Raskin describes a new phishing attack: taking over a background tab on a browser to trick people into entering in their login credentials. Clever....

WikiLeaks has organized the trove of documents about corporations aiding government surveillance around the world. It's worth wandering around through all this material....

Good security analysis of Safeplug, which is basically Tor in a box. Short answer: not yet....