Friday Squid Blogging: New Squid Species
A new squid species—of the Gonatidae family—was discovered. The video shows her holding a brood of very large eggs.
Research paper.
James Bamford on Section 702 Extension
Longtime NSA-watcher James Bamford has a long article on the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
Security Analysis of the EU’s Digital Wallet
A group of cryptographers have analyzed the eiDAS 2.0 regulation (electronic identification and trust services) that defines the new EU Digital Identity Wallet.
The US Is Banning Kaspersky
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.
Breaking the M-209
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.
Paul Nakasone Joins OpenAI’s Board of Directors
Former NSA Director Paul Nakasone has joined the board of OpenAI.
Ross Anderson’s Memorial Service
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”.)
Recovering Public Keys from Signatures
Interesting summary of various ways to derive the public key from digitally signed files.
Normally, with a signature scheme, you have the public key and want to know whether a given signature is valid. But what if we instead have a message and a signature, assume the signature is valid, and want to know which public key signed it? A rather delightful property if you want to attack anonymity in some proposed “everybody just uses cryptographic signatures for everything” scheme.
New Blog Moderation Policy
There has been a lot of toxicity in the comments section of this blog. Recently, we’re having to delete more and more comments. Not just spam and off-topic comments, but also sniping and personal attacks. It’s gotten so bad that I need to do something.
My options are limited because I’m just one person, and this website is free, ad-free, and anonymous. I pay for a part-time moderator out of pocket; he isn’t able to constantly monitor comments. And I’m unwilling to require verified accounts.
So starting now, we will be pre-screening comments and letting through only those that 1) are on topic, 2) contribute to the discussion, and 3) don’t attack or insult anyone. The standard is not going to be “well, I guess this doesn’t technically quite break a rule,” but “is this actually contributing.”
Obviously, this is a subjective standard; sometimes good comments will accidentally get thrown out. And the delayed nature of the screening will result in less conversation and more disjointed comments. Those are costs, and they’re significant ones. But something has to be done, and I would like to try this before turning off all comments.
I am going to disable comments on the weekly squid posts. Topicality is too murky on an open thread, and these posts are especially hard to keep on top of.
Comments will be reviewed and published when possible, usually in the morning and evening. Sometimes it will take longer. Again, the moderator is part time, so please be patient.
I apologize to all those who have just kept commenting reasonably all along. But I’ve received three e-mails in the past couple of months about people who have given up on comments because of the toxicity.
So let’s see if this works. I’ve been able to maintain an anonymous comment section on this blog for almost twenty years. It’s kind of astounding that it’s worked as long as it has. Maybe its time is up.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.