Hardware Vulnerability in Apple’s M-Series Chips
It’s yet another hardware side-channel attack: The threat resides in the chips’ data memory-dependent prefetcher, a hardware optimization that predicts the memory addresses of data that running code is likely to access ...
Security Vulnerability in Saflok’s RFID-Based Keycard Locks
It’s pretty devastating: Today, Ian Carroll, Lennert Wouters, and a team of other security researchers are revealing a hotel keycard hacking technique they call Unsaflok. The technique is a collection of security ...
On Secure Voting Systems
Andrew Appel shepherded a public comment—signed by twenty election cybersecurity experts, including myself—on best practices for ballot marking devices and vote tabulation. It was written for the Pennsylvania legislature, but it’s general ...
Licensing AI Engineers
The debate over professionalizing software engineers is decades old. (The basic idea is that, like lawyers and architects, there should be some professional licensing requirement for software engineers.) Here’s a law journal ...
Public AI as an Alternative to Corporate AI
This mini-essay was my contribution to a round table on Power and Governance in the Age of AI. It’s nothing I haven’t said here before, but for anyone who hasn’t read my ...
Cheating Automatic Toll Booths by Obscuring License Plates
The Wall Street Journal is reporting on a variety of techniques drivers are using to obscure their license plates so that automatic readers can’t identify them and charge tolls properly. Some drivers ...
AI and the Evolution of Social Media
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. A decade ago, social media was celebrated for sparking democratic uprisings in the Arab world and beyond. Now front pages are splashed with stories of social ...
Drones and the US Air Force
Fascinating analysis of the use of drones on a modern battlefield—that is, Ukraine—and the inability of the US Air Force to react to this change. The F-35A certainly remains an important platform ...
A Taxonomy of Prompt Injection Attacks
Researchers ran a global prompt hacking competition, and have documented the results in a paper that both gives a lot of good examples and tries to organize a taxonomy of effective prompt ...
How Public AI Can Strengthen Democracy
With the world’s focus turning to misinformation, manipulation, and outright propaganda ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, we know that democracy has an AI problem. But we’re learning that AI has ...
