feature built into the Linux kernel, to stealthily perform malicious activities
without being caught by many of the detection solutions currently on the market.

At the heart of the issue is the heavy reliance on monitoring system calls,
which has become the go-to method for many cybersecurity vendors. The problem?
Attackers can completely sidestep these monitored calls by leaning on io_uring
instead. This clever method could let bad actors quietly make network
connections or tamper with files without triggering the usual alarms.

HereΓÇÖs the code.

Note the self-serving nature of this announcement: ARMO, the company that
released the research and code, has a product that it claims blocks this kind of
attack.

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Cryptocurrency Thefts Get Physical

[2025.04.25] Long story of a $250 million cryptocurrency theft that, in a
complicated chain events, resulted in a pretty brutal kidnapping.

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Windscribe Acquitted on Charges of Not Collecting Users' Data

[2025.04.28] The company doesnΓÇÖt keep logs, so couldnΓÇÖt turn over data:

Windscribe, a globally used privacy-first VPN service, announced today that its
founder, Yegor Sak, has been fully acquitted by a court in Athens, Greece,
following a two-year legal battle in which Sak was personally charged in
connection with an alleged internet offence by an unknown user of the service.

The case centred around a Windscribe-owned server in Finland that was allegedly
used to breach a system in Greece. Greek authorities, in cooperation with
INTERPOL, traced the IP address to WindscribeΓÇÖs infrastructure and, unlike
standard international procedures, proceeded to initiate criminal proceedings
against Sak himself, rather than pursuing information through standard corporate
channels.

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Applying Security Engineering to Prompt Injection Security

[2025.04.29] This seems like an important advance in LLM security against prompt
injection:

Google DeepMind has unveiled CaMeL (CApabilities for MachinE Learning), a new
approach to stopping prompt-injection attacks that abandons the failed strategy
of having AI models police themselves. Instead, CaMeL treats language models as
fundamentally untrusted components within a secure software framework, creating
clear boundaries between user commands and potentially malicious content.

[...]

To understand CaMeL, you need to understand that prompt injections happen when
AI systems canΓÇÖt distinguish between legitimate user commands and malicious
instructions hidden in content theyΓÇÖre processing.

[...]

While CaMeL does use multiple AI models (a privileged LLM and a quarantined
LLM), what makes it innovative isnΓÇÖt reducing the number of models but
fundamentally changing the security architecture. Rather than expecting AI to
detect attacks, CaMeL implements established security engineering principles
like capability-based access control and data flow tracking to create boundaries
that remain effective even if an AI component is compromised.

Research paper. Good analysis by Simon Willison.

I wrote about the problem of LLMs intermingling the data and control paths here.

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WhatsApp Case Against NSO Group Progressing

[2025.04.30] Meta is suing NSO Group, basically claiming that the latter hacks
WhatsApp and not just WhatsApp users. We have a procedural ruling:

Under the order, NSO Group is prohibited from presenting evidence about its
customersΓÇÖ identities, implying the targeted WhatsApp users are suspected or
actual criminals, or alleging that WhatsApp had insufficient security
protections.

[...]

In making her ruling, Northern District of California Judge Phyllis Hamilton
said NSO Group undercut its arguments to use evidence about its customers with
contradictory statements.

ΓÇ£Defendants cannot claim, on the one hand, that its intent is to help its
clients fight terrorism and child exploitation, and on the other hand say that
it has nothing to do with what its client does with the technology, other than
advice and support,ΓÇ¥ she wrote. ΓÇ£Additionally, there is no evidence as to
the specific kinds of crimes or security threats that its clients actually
investigate and none with respect to the attacks at issue.ΓÇ¥

I have written about the issues at play in this case.

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US as a Surveillance State

[2025.05.01] Two essays were just published on DOGEΓÇÖs data collection and
aggregation, and how it ends with a modern surveillance state.

ItΓÇÖs good to see this finally being talked about.

EDITED TO ADD (5/3): HereΓÇÖs a free link to that first essay.

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NCSC Guidance on "Advanced Cryptography"

[2025.05.02] The UKΓÇÖs National Cyber Security Centre just released its white
paper on ΓÇ£Advanced Cryptography,ΓÇ¥ which it defines as ΓÇ£cryptographic
techniques for processing encrypted data, providing enhanced functionality over
and above that provided by traditional cryptography.ΓÇ¥ It includes things like
homomorphic encryption, attribute-based encryption, zero-knowledge proofs, and
secure multiparty computation.

ItΓÇÖs full of good advice. I especially appreciate this warning:

When deciding whether to use Advanced Cryptography, start with a clear
articulation of the problem, and use that to guide the development of an
appropriate solution. That is, you should not start with an Advanced
Cryptography technique, and then attempt to fit the functionality it provides to
the problem.

And:

In almost all cases, it is bad practice for users to design and/or implement
their own cryptography; this applies to Advanced Cryptography even more than
traditional cryptography because of the complexity of the algorithms. It also
applies to writing your own application based on a cryptographic library that
implements the Advanced Cryptography primitive operations, because subtle flaws
in how they are used can lead to serious security weaknesses.

The conclusion:

Advanced Cryptography covers a range of techniques for protecting sensitive data
at rest, in transit and in use. These techniques enable novel applications with
different trust relationships between the parties, as compared to traditional
cryptographic methods for encryption and authentication.

However, there are a number of factors to consider before deploying a solution
based on Advanced Cryptography, including the relative immaturity of the
techniques and their implementations, significant computational burdens and slow
response times, and the risk of opening up additional cyber attack vectors.

There are initiatives underway to standardise some forms of Advanced
Cryptography, and the efficiency of implementations is continually improving.
While many data processing problems can be solved with traditional cryptography
(which will usually lead to a simpler, lower-cost and more mature solution) for
those that cannot, Advanced Cryptography techniques could in the future enable
innovative ways of deriving benefit from large shared datase

--- BBBS/LiR v4.10 Toy-7
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