Toward Quantum Resilient Security Keys (Google Online Security Blog)

Actualités, Sécurité
Elie Bursztein, cybersecurity and AI research director, Fabian Kaczmarczyck, software engineer As part of our effort to deploy quantum resistant cryptography, we are happy to announce the release of the first quantum resilient FIDO2 security key implementation as part of OpenSK, our open source security key firmware. This open-source hardware optimized implementation uses a novel ECC/Dilithium hybrid signature schema that benefits from the security of ECC against standard attacks and Dilithium’s resilience against quantum attacks. This schema was co-developed in partnership with the ETH Zürich and won the ACNS secure cryptographic implementation workshop best paper. Quantum processor As progress toward practical quantum computers is accelerating, preparing for their advent is becoming a more pressing issue as time passes. In particular, standard public key cryptography which was designed to protect against…
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Diligere, Equity-Invest Are New Firms of U.K. Con Man (Krebs on Security)

Actualités, Sécurité
John Clifton Davies, a convicted fraudster estimated to have bilked dozens of technology startups out of more than $30 million through phony investment schemes, has a brand new pair of scam companies that are busy dashing startup dreams: A fake investment firm called Equity-Invest[.]ch, and Diligere[.]co.uk, a scam due diligence company that Equity-Invest insists all investment partners use. A native of the United Kingdom, Mr. Davies absconded from justice before being convicted on multiple counts of fraud in 2015. Prior to his conviction, Davies served 16 months in jail before being cleared on suspicion of murdering his third wife on their honeymoon in India. The scam artist John Bernard (left) in a recent Zoom call, and a photo of John Clifton Davies from 2015. John Clifton Davies was convicted in 2015…
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Making Chrome more secure by bringing Key Pinning to Android (Google Online Security Blog)

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Posted by David Adrian, Joe DeBlasio and Carlos Joan Rafael Ibarra Lopez, Chrome Security Chrome 106 added support for enforcing key pins on Android by default, bringing Android to parity with Chrome on desktop platforms. But what is key pinning anyway? One of the reasons Chrome implements key pinning is the “rule of two”. This rule is part of Chrome’s holistic secure development process. It says that when you are writing code for Chrome, you can pick no more than two of: code written in an unsafe language, processing untrustworthy inputs, and running without a sandbox. This blog post explains how key pinning and the rule of two are related. The Rule of Two Chrome is primarily written in the C and C++ languages, which are vulnerable to memory safety…
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Microsoft Patch Tuesday, August 2023 Edition (Krebs on Security)

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Microsoft Corp. today issued software updates to plug more than 70 security holes in its Windows operating systems and related products, including multiple zero-day vulnerabilities currently being exploited in the wild. Six of the flaws fixed today earned Microsoft’s “critical” rating, meaning malware or miscreants could use them to install software on a vulnerable Windows system without any help from users. Last month, Microsoft acknowledged a series of zero-day vulnerabilities in a variety of Microsoft products that were discovered and exploited in-the-wild attacks. They were assigned a single placeholder designation of CVE-2023-36884. Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, said the August patch batch addresses CVE-2023-36884, which involves bypassing the Windows Search Security feature. “Microsoft also released ADV230003, a defense-in-depth update designed to stop the attack chain associated that…
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An update on Chrome Security updates – shipping security fixes to you faster (Google Online Security Blog)

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Posted by Amy Ressler, Chrome Security Team To get security fixes to you faster, starting now in Chrome 116, Chrome is shipping weekly Stable channel updates. Chrome ships a new milestone release every four weeks. In between those major releases, we ship updates to address security and other high impact bugs. We currently schedule one of these Stable channel updates (or “Stable Refresh”) between each milestone. Starting in Chrome 116, Stable updates will be released every week between milestones. This should not change how you use or update Chrome, nor is the frequency of milestone releases changing, but it does mean security fixes will get to you faster. Reducing the Patch Gap Chromium is the open source project which powers Chrome and many other browsers. Anyone can view the source…
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Downfall and Zenbleed: Googlers helping secure the ecosystem (Google Online Security Blog)

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Tavis Ormandy, Software Engineer and Daniel Moghimi, Senior Research Scientist Finding and mitigating security vulnerabilities is critical to keeping Internet users safe.  However, the more complex a system becomes, the harder it is to secure—and that is also the case with computing hardware and processors, which have developed highly advanced capabilities over the years. This post will detail this trend by exploring Downfall and Zenbleed, two new security vulnerabilities (one of which was disclosed today) that prior to mitigation had the potential to affect billions of personal and cloud computers, signifying the importance of vulnerability research and cross-industry collaboration. Had these vulnerabilities not been discovered by Google researchers, and instead by adversaries, they would have enabled attackers to compromise Internet users. For both vulnerabilities, Google worked closely with our partners…
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Android 14 introduces first-of-its-kind cellular connectivity security features (Google Online Security Blog)

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Posted by Roger Piqueras Jover, Yomna Nasser, and Sudhi Herle Android is the first mobile operating system to introduce advanced cellular security mitigations for both consumers and enterprises. Android 14 introduces support for IT administrators to disable 2G support in their managed device fleet. Android 14 also introduces a feature that disables support for null-ciphered cellular connectivity. Hardening network security on Android The Android Security Model assumes that all networks are hostile to keep users safe from network packet injection, tampering, or eavesdropping on user traffic. Android does not rely on link-layer encryption to address this threat model. Instead, Android establishes that all network traffic should be end-to-end encrypted (E2EE). When a user connects to cellular networks for their communications (data, voice, or SMS), due to the distinctive nature of…
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Meet the Brains Behind the Malware-Friendly AI Chat Service ‘WormGPT’ (Krebs on Security)

Actualités, Sécurité
WormGPT, a private new chatbot service advertised as a way to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to write malicious software without all the pesky prohibitions on such activity enforced by the likes of ChatGPT and Google Bard, has started adding restrictions of its own on how the service can be used. Faced with customers trying to use WormGPT to create ransomware and phishing scams, the 23-year-old Portuguese programmer who created the project now says his service is slowly morphing into “a more controlled environment.” Image: SlashNext.com. The large language models (LLMs) made by ChatGPT parent OpenAI or Google or Microsoft all have various safety measures designed to prevent people from abusing them for nefarious purposes — such as creating malware or hate speech. In contrast, WormGPT has promoted itself as a…
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Pixel Binary Transparency: verifiable security for Pixel devices (Google Online Security Blog)

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Jay Hou, Software Engineer, TrustFabric (transparency.dev)  Pixel Binary Transparency With Android powering billions of devices, we’ve long put security first. There’s the more visible security features you might interact with regularly, like spam and phishing protection, as well as less obvious integrated security features, like daily scans for malware. For example, Android Verified Boot strives to ensure all executed code comes from a trusted source, rather than from an attacker or corruption. And with attacks on software and mobile devices constantly evolving, we’re continually strengthening these features and adding transparency into how Google protects users. This blog post peeks under the hood of Pixel Binary Transparency, a recent addition to Pixel security that puts you in control of checking if your Pixel is running a trusted installation of its operating…
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Teach a Man to Phish and He’s Set for Life (Krebs on Security)

Actualités, Sécurité
One frustrating aspect of email phishing is the frequency with which scammers fall back on tried-and-true methods that really have no business working these days. Like attaching a phishing email to a traditional, clean email message, or leveraging link redirects on LinkedIn, or abusing an encoding method that makes it easy to disguise booby-trapped Microsoft Windows files as relatively harmless documents. KrebsOnSecurity recently heard from a reader who was puzzled over an email he’d just received saying he needed to review and complete a supplied W-9 tax form. The missive was made to appear as if it were part of a mailbox delivery report from Microsoft 365 about messages that had failed to deliver. The reader, who asked to remain anonymous, said the phishing message contained an attachment that appeared…
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