Crypto-Gram

January 15, 2025

by Bruce Schneier

Fellow and Lecturer, Harvard Kennedy School

schneier@schneier.com

https://www.schneier.com

A free monthly newsletter providing summaries, analyses, insights, and commentaries on security: computer and otherwise.

For back issues, or to subscribe, visit Crypto-Gram’s web page.

These same essays and news items appear in the Schneier on Security blog, along with a lively and intelligent comment section. An RSS feed is available.

In this issue:

1. Short-Lived Certificates Coming to Let’s Encrypt

2. Hacking Digital License Plates

3. New Advances in the Understanding of Prime Numbers

4. Mailbox Insecurity

5. Criminal Complaint against LockBit Ransomware Writer

6. Spyware Maker NSO Group Found Liable for Hacking WhatsApp

7. Scams Based on Fake Google Emails

8. Casino Players Using Hidden Cameras for Cheating

9. Salt Typhoon’s Reach Continues to Grow

10. Gift Card Fraud

11. Google Is Allowing Device Fingerprinting

12. ShredOS

13. Privacy of Photos.app’s Enhanced Visual Search

14. US Treasury Department Sanctions Chinese Company Over Cyberattacks

15. Zero-Day Vulnerability in Ivanti VPN

16. Apps That Are Spying on Your Location

17. Microsoft Takes Legal Action Against AI “Hacking as a Service” Scheme

18. The First Password on the Internet

19. Upcoming Speaking Engagements

Short-Lived Certificates Coming to Let’s Encrypt

[2024.12.16] Starting next year:

Our longstanding offering won’t fundamentally change next year, but we are going to introduce a new offering that’s a big shift from anything we’ve done before—short-lived certificates. Specifically, certificates with a lifetime of six days. This is a big upgrade for the security of the TLS ecosystem because it minimizes exposure time during a key compromise event.

Because we’ve done so much to encourage automation over the past decade, most of our subscribers aren’t going to have to do much in order to switch to shorter lived certificates. We, on the other hand, are going to have to think about the possibility that we will need to issue 20x as many certificates as we do now. It’s not inconceivable that at some point in our next decade we may need to be prepared to issue 100,000,000 certificates per day.

That sounds sort of nuts to me today, but issuing 5,000,000 certificates per day would have sounded crazy to me ten years ago.

This is an excellent idea.

Slashdot thread.

Hacking Digital License Plates

[2024.12.17] Not everything needs to be digital and “smart.” License plates, for example:

Josep Rodriguez, a researcher at security firm IOActive, has revealed a technique to “jailbreak” digital license plates sold by Reviver, the leading vendor of those plates in the US with 65,000 plates already sold. By removing a sticker on the back of the plate and attaching a cable to its internal connectors, he’s able to rewrite a Reviver plate’s firmware in a matter of minutes. Then, with that custom firmware installed, the jailbroken license plate can receive commands via Bluetooth from a smartphone app to instantly change its display to show any characters or image.

[…]

Because the vulnerability that allowed him to rewrite the plates’ firmware exists at the hardware level—in Reviver’s chips themselves—Rodriguez says there’s no way for Reviver to patch the issue with a mere software update. Instead, it would have to replace those chips in each display.

The whole point of a license plate is that it can’t be modified. Why in the world would anyone think that a digital version is a good idea?

New Advances in the Understanding of Prime Numbers

[2024.12.18] Really interesting research into the structure of prime numbers. Not immediately related to the cryptanalysis of prime-number-based public-key algorithms, but every little bit matters.

Mailbox Insecurity

[2024.12.19] It turns out that all cluster mailboxes in the Denver area have the same master key. So if someone robs a postal carrier, they can open any mailbox.

I get that a single master key makes the whole system easier, but it’s very fragile security.

Criminal Complaint against LockBit Ransomware Writer

[2024.12.23] The Justice Department has published the criminal complaint against Dmitry Khoroshev, for building and maintaining the LockBit ransomware.

Spyware Maker NSO Group Found Liable for Hacking WhatsApp

[2024.12.24] A judge has found that NSO Group, maker of the Pegasus spyware, has violated the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by hacking WhatsApp in order to spy on people using it.

Jon Penney and I wrote a legal paper on the case.

Scams Based on Fake Google Emails

[2024.12.26] Scammers are hacking Google Forms to send email to victims that come from google.com.

Brian Krebs reports on the effects.

Boing Boing post.

Casino Players Using Hidden Cameras for Cheating

[2024.12.27] The basic strategy is to place a device with a hidden camera in a position to capture normally hidden card values, which are interpreted by an accomplice off-site and fed back to the player via a hidden microphone. Miniaturization is making these devices harder to detect. Presumably AI will soon obviate the need for an accomplice.

Salt Typhoon’s Reach Continues to Grow

[2024.12.30] The US government has identified a ninth telecom that was successfully hacked by Salt Typhoon.

Gift Card Fraud

[2024.12.31] It’s becoming an organized crime tactic:

Card draining is when criminals remove gift cards from a store display, open them in a separate location, and either record the card numbers and PINs or replace them with a new barcode. The crooks then repair the packaging, return to a store and place the cards back on a rack. When a customer unwittingly selects and loads money onto a tampered card, the criminal is able to access the card online and steal the balance.

[…]

In card draining, the runners assist with removing, tampering and restocking of gift cards, according to court documents and investigators.

A single runner driving from store to store can swipe or return thousands of tampered cards to racks in a short time. “What they do is they just fly into the city and they get a rental car and they just hit every big-box location that they can find along a corridor off an interstate,” said Parks.

Google Is Allowing Device Fingerprinting

[2025.01.02] Lukasz Olejnik writes about device fingerprinting, and why Google’s policy change to allow it in 2025 is a major privacy setback.

EDITED TO ADD (1/12): Shashdot thread.

ShredOS

[2025.01.03] ShredOS is a stripped-down operating system designed to destroy data.

GitHub page here.

Privacy of Photos.app’s Enhanced Visual Search

[2025.01.06] Initial speculation about a new Apple feature.

US Treasury Department Sanctions Chinese Company Over Cyberattacks

[2025.01.07] From the Washington Post:

The sanctions target Beijing Integrity Technology Group, which U.S. officials say employed workers responsible for the Flax Typhoon attacks which compromised devices including routers and internet-enabled cameras to infiltrate government and industrial targets in the United States, Taiwan, Europe and elsewhere.

Zero-Day Vulnerability in Ivanti VPN

[2025.01.09] It’s being actively exploited.

Apps That Are Spying on Your Location

[2025.01.10] 404 Media and Wired are reporting on all the apps that are spying on your location, based on a hack of the location data company Gravy Analytics:

The thousands of apps, included in hacked files from location data company Gravy Analytics, include everything from games like Candy Crush to dating apps like Tinder, to pregnancy tracking and religious prayer apps across both Android and iOS. Because much of the collection is occurring through the advertising ecosystem—not code developed by the app creators themselves—this data collection is likely happening both without users’ and even app developers’ knowledge.

Microsoft Takes Legal Action Against AI “Hacking as a Service” Scheme

[2025.01.13] Not sure this will matter in the end, but it’s a positive move:

Microsoft is accusing three individuals of running a “hacking-as-a-service” scheme that was designed to allow the creation of harmful and illicit content using the company’s platform for AI-generated content.

The foreign-based defendants developed tools specifically designed to bypass safety guardrails Microsoft has erected to prevent the creation of harmful content through its generative AI services, said Steven Masada, the assistant general counsel for Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit. They then compromised the legitimate accounts of paying customers. They combined those two things to create a fee-based platform people could use.

It was a sophisticated scheme:

The service contained a proxy server that relayed traffic between its customers and the servers providing Microsoft’s AI services, the suit alleged. Among other things, the proxy service used undocumented Microsoft network application programming interfaces (APIs) to communicate with the company’s Azure computers. The resulting requests were designed to mimic legitimate Azure OpenAPI Service API requests and used compromised API keys to authenticate them.

Slashdot thread.

The First Password on the Internet

[2025.01.14] It was created in 1973 by Peter Kirstein:

So from the beginning I put password protection on my gateway. This had been done in such a way that even if UK users telephoned directly into the communications computer provided by Darpa in UCL, they would require a password.

In fact this was the first password on Arpanet. It proved invaluable in satisfying authorities on both sides of the Atlantic for the 15 years I ran the service during which no security breach occurred over my link. I also put in place a system of governance that any UK users had to be approved by a committee which I chaired but which also had UK government and British Post Office representation.

I wish he’d told us what that password was.

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

[2025.01.14] This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

- I’m speaking on “AI: Trust & Power” at Capricon 45 in Chicago, Illinois, USA, at 11:30 AM on February 7, 2025. I’m also signing books there on Saturday, February 8, starting at 1:45 PM.

- I’m speaking at Boskone 62 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, which runs from February 14-16, 2025.

- I’m speaking at the Rossfest Symposium in Cambridge, UK, on March 25, 2025.

The list is maintained on this page.

Since 1998, CRYPTO-GRAM has been a free monthly newsletter providing summaries, analyses, insights, and commentaries on security technology. To subscribe, or to read back issues, see Crypto-Gram’s web page.

You can also read these articles on my blog, Schneier on Security.

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Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, called a security guru by the Economist. He is the author of over one dozen books—including his latest, A Hacker’s Mind—as well as hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers. His newsletter and blog are read by over 250,000 people. Schneier is a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School; a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, AccessNow, and the Tor Project; and an Advisory Board Member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and VerifiedVoting.org. He is the Chief of Security Architecture at Inrupt, Inc.

Copyright © 2025 by Bruce Schneier.