A new paper presents a polynomial-time quantum algorithm for solving certain hard lattice problems. This could be a big deal for post-quantum cryptographic algorithms, since many of them base their security on hard lattice problems.

A few things to note. One, this paper has not yet been peer reviewed. As this comment points out: “We had already some cases where efficient quantum algorithms for lattice problems were discovered, but they turned out not being correct or only worked for simple special cases .”

Two, this is a quantum algorithm, which means that it has not been tested. There is a wide gulf between quantum algorithms in theory and in practice. And until we can actually code and test these algorithms, we should be suspicious of their speed and complexity claims.

And three, I am not surprised at all. We don’t have nearly enough analysis of lattice-based cryptosystems to be confident in their security.

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

• I’m speaking twice at RSA Conference 2024 in San Francisco. I’ll be on a panel on software liability on May 6, 2024 at 8:30 AM, and I’m giving a keynote on AI and democracy on May 7, 2024 at 2:25 PM.

The list is maintained on this page .

Someone got caught trying to smuggle 322 pounds of gold (that’s about 1/4 of a cubic foot) out of Hong Kong. It was disguised as machine parts:

On March 27, customs officials x-rayed two air compressors and discovered that they contained gold that had been “concealed in the integral parts” of the compressors. Those gold parts had also been painted silver to match the other components in an attempt to throw customs off the trail.

Units on alert, naval ships repositioning, bombers postured to fly, Marines ready to storm the beaches. These are all of the routines of a crisis that signals U.S. military readiness for war. But there’s another routine that often eludes Washington’s acknowledgment: the military’s own deployment schedule when it comes to units venturing out there into the real world. The schedule is sacrosanct. So while some might think the potential for war with Iran — right now — is high and the U.S. military is on high alert, the reality is that it’s business as usual.

On Friday, the Pentagon made vague statements that it is moving assets to the Middle East to express American displeasure and readiness should Iran attack Israel. President Joe Biden made a public threat toward Iran: “Don’t,” referring to any Iranian strike. And the administration trumpeted the presence of Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla, commander of Central Command, or CENTCOM, in Israel, there to “consult” with America’s ironclad partner.

But as Washington hawks and the news media hold their breath for what they call an “imminent” strike overseen by Tehran on Israeli soil, the U.S. military in the Middle East is sticking to its regular schedule of soldier comings and goings, including the redeployment of a high-profile Marine battle group that returned to the U.S. after an eight-month voyage.

In fact, thousands of Marines, Navy sailors, Army troops, and Air Force war fighters have cycled back stateside over the past few weeks and even since the Israeli attack on the Iranian Embassy compound in Syria on April 1. In a purely routine way, in accordance with existing plans, some half-dozen deployments to the Middle East have come to an end. For the armed services, maintaining soldier schedules is more important than geopolitics. And indeed, there’s no evidence that the military services take much notice of the contradiction between their schedules and a brewing escalation. They are more focused on trying to please service members, wives, and parents in their bids to recruit and retain enlisted people than they are on the Pentagon’s war game machinations.

Even the Army’s undertakers are calling it quits. According to a recent announcement , Army body-bag handlers returned from the Middle East this month. “The 54th Quartermaster Company is the Army’s only active-duty mortuary affairs unit,” the announcement reads. “The unit sent 29 Soldiers to Kuwait, Iraq, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates in support of a wide array of operations in the region. Today, we get to welcome back detachment number one, 29 of our best from CENTCOM,” the company commander Capt. Peter Kase said.

Meanwhile, service members overseeing rescue operations relating to air and naval attacks by Yemen returned home this month . An announcement celebrating the accomplishments and return of the U.S. Air Force Capt. Araceli Saunders last week details her efforts while deployed in Saudi Arabia, including “providing airborne alert for Operation POSEIDON ARCHER enabling thirty-one coalition strikes on Yemeni bases” and “reducing the threat to international maritime shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.”

Despite Houthi attacks from Yemen and Iran-backed militia strikes from Syria and Iraq, U.S. forces routinely cycle in and out of the Middle East. On March 16, more than 4,000 Marines and sailors with the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit began their journey home from a deployment that was reoriented from pure training to direct support for American diplomacy and military readiness after the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7.

Meanwhile, soldiers tasked with strengthening deterrence on land, according to the Army, have also ended their deployments. On February 8, artillery gunners with the Michigan Army National Guard returned from a deployment to Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates. According to the press release , the soldiers supported Operation Inherent Resolve, the military’s ongoing war against ISIS.

“Alpha Battery’s accomplishments during their deployment underscore the Michigan National Guard’s commitment to ensuring the safety and security of our nation,” a spokespeople said. “Their dedication and proficiency in operating the HIMARS [long-range missile] system have significantly advanced our strategic objectives in the region.”

The return of soldiers from CENTCOM follows an announcement this past week that the 379th Air Expeditionary Wing, based out of Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, is reorganizing to better meet its own internal deployment requirements. There’s no mention of strategic reshuffling to meet imminent plans for war, but rather “to provide predictability for Airmen” in future deployments and rotations, in other words, to meet quality-of-life objectives.

As intelligence officials give dire predictions to the New York Times about Iran’s threat, and Israeli military officials warn citizens against hoarding in preparation for a volley of cruise missiles, Iran continues to go to great lengths to avoid an out-of-control conflict with its sworn adversary, and its hawkish Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

A Financial Times report from this week details Iran’s efforts to convey through diplomatic channels that it does not wish to see an escalation that stokes all-out war with Israel and the United States. This and other news media reports say that Iran is engaging the United States through diplomatic channels to find a response that both demonstrates deterrence in response to the April 1 strike, without starting a war. (The U.S. and Iran have been talking through Oman to avoid an appearance of direct negotiations.)

In a subtle nod to its view that it’s business as usual, the U.S. Navy quietly relinquished command of the Red Sea Combined Task Force 153, handing it over to an Italian counterpart at the beginning of April. “I am incredibly proud of all the hard work and dedication by CTF 153 staff and units at-sea in support of Operation Prosperity Guardian,” outgoing U.S. Navy commander Capt. David Coles said. “Their efforts have directly contributed to regional maritime security and freedom of navigation in the CTF 153 area of operations. … It is a true honor to hand over command to an incredibly strong maritime partner like Italy. I know the Task Force is in good hands, and look forward to celebrating CTF 153’s future accomplishments under Capt. Messina’s stewardship.”

If Iran attacks Israel or the United States, on the ground, the American military posture looks routine, nowhere near matching the feverish vibes coming out of Washington. From his hotel room in Tel Aviv, Kurilla undoubtedly is closer to the action with his cellphone on red alert. But his visit is purely symbolic with regard to Iran. The truth is that the U.S. “mission” in the Middle East right now is as much to dissuade Israel from escalating.

The post U.S. Military Isn’t That Concerned About War With Iran appeared first on The Intercept .

Last week I posted a short memorial of Ross Anderson. The Communications of the ACM asked me to expand it. Here’s the longer version .

EDITED TO ADD (4/11): Two weeks before he passed away, Ross gave an 80-minute interview where he told his life story.

Listen to the Audio on SoundCloud.com

Bruce Schneier was at the first ever RSA Conference in 1991, and he was the first ‘exhibitor’ in 1994 when he asked Jim Bidzos, Creator of the RSA Conference, if he could sell copies of his book “Applied Cryptography.” Bidzos set Schneier up in the hotel lobby where the conference was being held—and the rest is history. Listen to some great RSA Conference memories on this episode of the History of RSA Conference.

Last week, the internet dodged a major nation-state attack that would have had catastrophic cybersecurity repercussions worldwide. It’s a catastrophe that didn’t happen, so it won’t get much attention—but it should. There’s an important moral to the story of the attack and its discovery : The security of the global internet depends on countless obscure pieces of software written and maintained by even more obscure unpaid, distractible, and sometimes vulnerable volunteers. It’s an untenable situation, and one that is being exploited by malicious actors. Yet precious little is being done to remedy it.

Programmers dislike doing extra work. If they can find already-written code that does what they want, they’re going to use it rather than recreate the functionality. These code repositories, called libraries, are hosted on sites like GitHub. There are libraries for everything: displaying objects in 3D, spell-checking, performing complex mathematics, managing an e-commerce shopping cart, moving files around the internet—everything. Libraries are essential to modern programming; they’re the building blocks of complex software. The modularity they provide makes software projects tractable. Everything you use contains dozens of these libraries: some commercial, some open source and freely available. They are essential to the functionality of the finished software. And to its security.

You’ve likely never heard of an open-source library called XZ Utils, but it’s on hundreds of millions of computers. It’s probably on yours. It’s certainly in whatever corporate or organizational network you use. It’s a freely available library that does data compression. It’s important, in the same way that hundreds of other similar obscure libraries are important.

Many open-source libraries, like XZ Utils, are maintained by volunteers. In the case of XZ Utils, it’s one person, named Lasse Collin. He has been in charge of XZ Utils since he wrote it in 2009. And, at least in 2022, he’s had some “ longterm mental health issues. ” (To be clear, he is not to blame in this story. This is a systems problem.)

Beginning in at least 2021, Collin was personally targeted . We don’t know by whom, but we have account names: Jia Tan, Jigar Kumar, Dennis Ens. They’re not real names. They pressured Collin to transfer control over XZ Utils. In early 2023, they succeeded. Tan spent the year slowly incorporating a backdoor into XZ Utils: disabling systems that might discover his actions, laying the groundwork, and finally adding the complete backdoor earlier this year. On March 25, Hans Jansen—another fake name—tried to push the various Unix systems to upgrade to the new version of XZ Utils.

And everyone was poised to do so. It’s a routine update. In the span of a few weeks, it would have been part of both Debian and Red Hat Linux, which run on the vast majority of servers on the internet. But on March 29, another unpaid volunteer, Andres Freund—a real person who works for Microsoft but who was doing this in his spare time—noticed something weird about how much processing the new version of XZ Utils was doing. It’s the sort of thing that could be easily overlooked, and even more easily ignored. But for whatever reason, Freund tracked down the weirdness and discovered the backdoor.

It’s a masterful piece of work . It affects the SSH remote login protocol, basically by adding a hidden piece of functionality that requires a specific key to enable. Someone with that key can use the backdoored SSH to upload and execute an arbitrary piece of code on the target machine. SSH runs as root, so that code could have done anything. Let your imagination run wild.

This isn’t something a hacker just whips up. This backdoor is the result of a years-long engineering effort. The ways the code evades detection in source form, how it lies dormant and undetectable until activated, and its immense power and flexibility give credence to the widely held assumption that a major nation-state is behind this.

If it hadn’t been discovered, it probably would have eventually ended up on every computer and server on the internet. Though it’s unclear whether the backdoor would have affected Windows and Mac, it would have worked on Linux. Remember in 2020, when Russia planted a backdoor into SolarWinds that affected 14,000 networks? That seemed like a lot, but this would have been orders of magnitude more damaging. And again, the catastrophe was averted only because a volunteer stumbled on it. And it was possible in the first place only because the first unpaid volunteer, someone who turns out to be a national security single point of failure, was personally targeted and exploited by a foreign actor.

This is no way to run critical national infrastructure. And yet, here we are. This was an attack on our software supply chain . This attack subverted software dependencies. The SolarWinds attack targeted the update process. Other attacks target system design, development, and deployment. Such attacks are becoming increasingly common and effective, and also are increasingly the weapon of choice of nation-states.

It’s impossible to count how many of these single points of failure are in our computer systems. And there’s no way to know how many of the unpaid and unappreciated maintainers of critical software libraries are vulnerable to pressure. (Again, don’t blame them. Blame the industry that is happy to exploit their unpaid labor.) Or how many more have accidentally created exploitable vulnerabilities. How many other coercion attempts are ongoing? A dozen? A hundred? It seems impossible that the XZ Utils operation was a unique instance.

Solutions are hard. Banning open source won’t work; it’s precisely because XZ Utils is open source that an engineer discovered the problem in time. Banning software libraries won’t work, either; modern software can’t function without them. For years security engineers have been pushing something called a “ software bill of materials ”: an ingredients list of sorts so that when one of these packages is compromised, network owners at least know if they’re vulnerable. The industry hates this idea and has been fighting it for years, but perhaps the tide is turning .

The fundamental problem is that tech companies dislike spending extra money even more than programmers dislike doing extra work. If there’s free software out there, they are going to use it—and they’re not going to do much in-house security testing. Easier software development equals lower costs equals more profits. The market economy rewards this sort of insecurity.

We need some sustainable ways to fund open-source projects that become de facto critical infrastructure. Public shaming can help here. The Open Source Security Foundation (OSSF), founded in 2022 after another critical vulnerability in an open-source library—Log4j—was discovered, addresses this problem . The big tech companies pledged $30 million in funding after the critical Log4j supply chain vulnerability, but they never delivered. And they are still happy to make use of all this free labor and free resources, as a recent Microsoft anecdote indicates. The companies benefiting from these freely available libraries need to actually step up, and the government can force them to.

There’s a lot of tech that could be applied to this problem, if corporations were willing to spend the money. Liabilities will help. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA’s) “secure by design” initiative will help, and CISA is finally partnering with OSSF on this problem. Certainly the security of these libraries needs to be part of any broad government cybersecurity initiative.

We got extraordinarily lucky this time, but maybe we can learn from the catastrophe that didn’t happen. Like the power grid, communications network, and transportation systems, the software supply chain is critical infrastructure , part of national security, and vulnerable to foreign attack. The U.S. government needs to recognize this as a national security problem and start treating it as such.

This essay originally appeared in Lawfare .

The cybersecurity world got really lucky last week. An intentionally placed backdoor in XZ Utils, an open-source compression utility, was pretty much accidentally discovered by a Microsoft engineer—weeks before it would have been incorporated into both Debian and Red Hat Linux. From ArsTehnica :

Malicious code added to XZ Utils versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 modified the way the software functions. The backdoor manipulated sshd, the executable file used to make remote SSH connections. Anyone in possession of a predetermined encryption key could stash any code of their choice in an SSH login certificate, upload it, and execute it on the backdoored device. No one has actually seen code uploaded, so it’s not known what code the attacker planned to run. In theory, the code could allow for just about anything, including stealing encryption keys or installing malware.

It was an incredibly complex backdoor . Installing it was a multi-year process that seems to have involved social engineering the lone unpaid engineer in charge of the utility. More from ArsTechnica:

In 2021, someone with the username JiaT75 made their first known commit to an open source project. In retrospect, the change to the libarchive project is suspicious, because it replaced the safe_fprint function with a variant that has long been recognized as less secure. No one noticed at the time.

The following year, JiaT75 submitted a patch over the XZ Utils mailing list, and, almost immediately, a never-before-seen participant named Jigar Kumar joined the discussion and argued that Lasse Collin, the longtime maintainer of XZ Utils, hadn’t been updating the software often or fast enough. Kumar, with the support of Dennis Ens and several other people who had never had a presence on the list, pressured Collin to bring on an additional developer to maintain the project.

There’s a lot more. The sophistication of both the exploit and the process to get it into the software project scream nation-state operation. It’s reminiscent of Solar Winds, although (1) it would have been much, much worse, and (2) we got really, really lucky.

I simply don’t believe this was the only attempt to slip a backdoor into a critical piece of Internet software, either closed source or open source. Given how lucky we were to detect this one, I believe this kind of operation has been successful in the past. We simply have to stop building our critical national infrastructure on top of random software libraries managed by lone unpaid distracted—or worse—individuals.

Ross Anderson unexpectedly passed away Thursday night in, I believe, his home in Cambridge.

I can’t remember when I first met Ross. Of course it was before 2008, when we created the Security and Human Behavior workshop. It was well before 2001, when we created the Workshop on Economics and Information Security . (Okay, he created both—I helped.) It was before 1998, when we wrote about the problems with key escrow systems. I was one of the people he brought to the Newton Institute, at Cambridge University, for the six-month cryptography residency program he ran (I mistakenly didn’t stay the whole time)—that was in 1996.

I know I was at the first Fast Software Encryption workshop in December 1993, another conference he created. There I presented the Blowfish encryption algorithm. Pulling an old first-edition of Applied Cryptography (the one with the blue cover) down from the shelf, I see his name in the acknowledgments. Which means that sometime in early 1993—probably at Eurocrypt in Lofthus, Norway—I, as an unpublished book author who had only written a couple of crypto articles for Dr. Dobb’s Journal , asked him to read and comment on my book manuscript. And he said yes. Which means I mailed him a paper copy. And he read it. And mailed his handwritten comments back to me. In an envelope with stamps. Because that’s how we did it back then.

I have known Ross for over thirty years, as both a colleague and a friend. He was enthusiastic, brilliant, opinionated, articulate, curmudgeonly, and kind. Pick up any of his academic papers—there are many —and odds are that you will find a least one unexpected insight. He was a cryptographer and security engineer, but also very much a generalist. He published on block cipher cryptanalysis in the 1990s, and the security of large-language models last year. He started conferences like nobody’s business. His masterwork book, Security Engineering —now in its third edition—is as comprehensive a tome on cybersecurity and related topics as you could imagine. (Also note his fifteen-lecture video series on that same page. If you have never heard Ross lecture, you’re in for a treat.) He was the first person to understand that security problems are often actually economic problems . He was the first person to make a lot of those sorts of connections. He fought against surveillance and backdoors, and for academic freedom. He didn’t suffer fools in either government or the corporate world.

He’s listed in the acknowledgments as a reader of every one of my books from Beyond Fear on. Recently, we’d see each other a couple of times a year: at this or that workshop or event. The last time I saw him was last June, at SHB 2023 , in Pittsburgh. We were having dinner on Alessandro Acquisti ‘s rooftop patio, celebrating another successful workshop. He was going to attend my Workshop on Reimagining Democracy in December, but he had to cancel at the last minute. (He sent me the talk he was going to give. I will see about posting it.) The day before he died, we were discussing how to accommodate everyone who registered for this year’s SHB workshop . I learned something from him every single time we talked. And I am not the only one.

My heart goes out to his wife Shireen and his family. We lost him much too soon.

EDITED TO ADD (4/10): I wrote a longer version for Communications of the ACM .