Public Surveillance of Bars
This article about an app that lets people remotely view bars to see if they’re crowded or not is filled with commentary—on both sides—about privacy and openness.
This article about an app that lets people remotely view bars to see if they’re crowded or not is filled with commentary—on both sides—about privacy and openness.
A new paper, “Polynomial Time Cryptanalytic Extraction of Neural Network Models,” by Adi Shamir and others, uses ideas from differential cryptanalysis to extract the weights inside a neural network using specific queries and their results. This is much more theoretical than practical, but it’s a really interesting result.
Abstract:
Billions of dollars and countless GPU hours are currently spent on training Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) for a variety of tasks. Thus, it is essential to determine the difficulty of extracting all the parameters of such neural networks when given access to their black-box implementations. Many versions of this problem have been studied over the last 30 years, and the best current attack on ReLU-based deep neural networks was presented at Crypto’20 by Carlini, Jagielski, and Mironov. It resembles a differential chosen plaintext attack on a cryptosystem, which has a secret key embedded in its black-box implementation and requires a polynomial number of queries but an exponential amount of time (as a function of the number of neurons). In this paper, we improve this attack by developing several new techniques that enable us to extract with arbitrarily high precision all the real-valued parameters of a ReLU-based DNN using a polynomial number of queries and a polynomial amount of time. We demonstrate its practical efficiency by applying it to a full-sized neural network for classifying the CIFAR10 dataset, which has 3072 inputs, 8 hidden layers with 256 neurons each, and about 1.2 million neuronal parameters. An attack following the approach by Carlini et al. requires an exhaustive search over 2^256 possibilities. Our attack replaces this with our new techniques, which require only 30 minutes on a 256-core computer.
A new squid species—of the Gonatidae family—was discovered. The video shows her holding a brood of very large eggs.
Research paper.
Longtime NSA-watcher James Bamford has a long article on the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
A group of cryptographers have analyzed the eiDAS 2.0 regulation (electronic identification and trust services) that defines the new EU Digital Identity Wallet.
This move has been coming for a long time.
The Biden administration on Thursday said it’s banning the company from selling its products to new US-based customers starting on July 20, with the company only allowed to provide software updates to existing customers through September 29. The ban—the first such action under authorities given to the Commerce Department in 2019—follows years of warnings from the US intelligence community about Kaspersky being a national security threat because Moscow could allegedly commandeer its all-seeing antivirus software to spy on its customers.
Interesting paper about a German cryptanalysis machine that helped break the US M-209 mechanical ciphering machine.
The paper contains a good description of how the M-209 works.
Former NSA Director Paul Nakasone has joined the board of OpenAI.
The memorial service for Ross Anderson will be held on Saturday, at 2:00 PM BST. People can attend remotely on Zoom. (The passcode is “L3954FrrEF”.)
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.