Security – Page 2

FCC to rescind ruling that said ISPs are required to secure their networks

FCC, Policy, salt typhoon, Security / 9u50fv / November 1, 2025

The Federal Communications Commission will vote in November to repeal a ruling that requires telecom providers to secure their networks, acting on a request from the biggest lobby groups representing Internet providers.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said the ruling, adopted in January just before Republicans gained majority control of the commission, “exceeded the agency’s authority and did not present an effective or agile response to the relevant cybersecurity threats.” Carr said the vote scheduled for November 20 comes after “extensive FCC engagement with carriers” who have taken “substantial steps… to strengthen their cybersecurity defenses.”

The FCC’s January 2025 declaratory ruling came in response to attacks by China, including the Salt Typhoon infiltration of major telecom providers such as Verizon and AT&T. The Biden-era FCC found that the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), a 1994 law, “affirmatively requires telecommunications carriers to secure their networks from unlawful access or interception of communications.”

“The Commission has previously found that section 105 of CALEA creates an affirmative obligation for a telecommunications carrier to avoid the risk that suppliers of untrusted equipment will ‘illegally activate interceptions or other forms of surveillance within the carrier’s switching premises without its knowledge,’” the January order said. “With this Declaratory Ruling, we clarify that telecommunications carriers’ duties under section 105 of CALEA extend not only to the equipment they choose to use in their networks, but also to how they manage their networks.”

ISPs get what they want

The declaratory ruling was paired with a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would have led to stricter rules requiring specific steps to secure networks against unauthorized interception. Carr voted against the decision at the time.

Although the declaratory ruling didn’t yet have specific rules to go along with it, the FCC at the time said it had some teeth. “Even absent rules adopted by the Commission, such as those proposed below, we believe that telecommunications carriers would be unlikely to satisfy their statutory obligations under section 105 without adopting certain basic cybersecurity practices for their communications systems and services,” the January order said. “For example, basic cybersecurity hygiene practices such as implementing role-based access controls, changing default passwords, requiring minimum password strength, and adopting multifactor authentication are necessary for any sensitive computer system. Furthermore, a failure to patch known vulnerabilities or to employ best practices that are known to be necessary in response to identified exploits would appear to fall short of fulfilling this statutory obligation.”

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New physical attacks are quickly diluting secure enclave defenses from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel

AMD, battering ram, Biz & IT, Features, intel, NVIDIA, secure enclaves, Security, tee.fail, trusted execution environments, wiretap / Shannon Garcia / October 29, 2025

On-chip TEEs withstand rooted OSes but fall instantly to cheap physical attacks.

Trusted execution environments, or TEEs, are everywhere—in blockchain architectures, virtually every cloud service, and computing involving AI, finance, and defense contractors. It’s hard to overstate the reliance that entire industries have on three TEEs in particular: Confidential Compute from Nvidia, SEV-SNP from AMD, and SGX and TDX from Intel. All three come with assurances that confidential data and sensitive computing can’t be viewed or altered, even if a server has suffered a complete compromise of the operating kernel.

A trio of novel physical attacks raises new questions about the true security offered by these TEES and the exaggerated promises and misconceptions coming from the big and small players using them.

The most recent attack, released Tuesday, is known as TEE.fail. It defeats the latest TEE protections from all three chipmakers. The low-cost, low-complexity attack works by placing a small piece of hardware between a single physical memory chip and the motherboard slot it plugs into. It also requires the attacker to compromise the operating system kernel. Once this three-minute attack is completed, Confidential Compute, SEV-SNP, and TDX/SDX can no longer be trusted. Unlike the Battering RAM and Wiretap attacks from last month—which worked only against CPUs using DDR4 memory—TEE.fail works against DDR5, allowing them to work against the latest TEEs.

Some terms apply

All three chipmakers exclude physical attacks from threat models for their TEEs, also known as secure enclaves. Instead, assurances are limited to protecting data and execution from viewing or tampering, even when the kernel OS running the processor has been compromised. None of the chipmakers make these carveouts prominent, and they sometimes provide confusing statements about the TEE protections offered.

Many users of these TEEs make public assertions about the protections that are flat-out wrong, misleading, or unclear. All three chipmakers and many TEE users focus on the suitability of the enclaves for protecting servers on a network edge, which are often located in remote locations, where physical access is a top threat.

“These features keep getting broken, but that doesn’t stop vendors from selling them for these use cases—and people keep believing them and spending time using them,” said HD Moore, a security researcher and the founder and CEO of runZero.

He continued:

Overall, it’s hard for a customer to know what they are getting when they buy confidential computing in the cloud. For on-premise deployments, it may not be obvious that physical attacks (including side channels) are specifically out of scope. This research shows that server-side TEEs are not effective against physical attacks, and even more surprising, Intel and AMD consider these out of scope. If you were expecting TEEs to provide private computing in untrusted data centers, these attacks should change your mind.

Those making these statements run the gamut from cloud providers to AI engines, blockchain platforms, and even the chipmakers themselves. Here are some examples:

Cloudflare says it’s using Secure Memory Encryption—the encryption engine driving SEV—to safeguard confidential data from being extracted from a server if it’s stolen.
In a post outlining the possibility of using the TEEs to secure confidential information discussed in chat sessions, Anthropic says the enclave “includes protections against physical attacks.”
Microsoft marketing (here and here) devotes plenty of ink to discussing TEE protections without ever noting the exclusion.
Meta, paraphrasing the Confidential Computing Consortium, says TEE security provides protections against malicious “system administrators, the infrastructure owner, or anyone else with physical access to the hardware.” SEV-SNP is a key pillar supporting the security of Meta’s WhatsApp Messenger.
Even Nvidia claims that its TEE security protects against “infrastructure owners such as cloud providers, or anyone with physical access to the servers.”
The maker of the Signal private messenger assures users that its use of SGX means that “keys associated with this encryption never leave the underlying CPU, so they’re not accessible to the server owners or anyone else with access to server infrastructure.” Signal has long relied on SGX to protect contact-discovery data.

I counted more than a dozen other organizations providing assurances that were similarly confusing, misleading, or false. Even Moore—a security veteran with more than three decades of experience—told me: “The surprising part to me is that Intel/AMD would blanket-state that physical access is somehow out of scope when it’s the entire point.”

In fairness, some TEE users build additional protections on top of the TEEs provided out of the box. Meta, for example, said in an email that the WhatsApp implementation of SEV-SNP uses protections that would block TEE.fail attackers from impersonating its servers. The company didn’t dispute that TEE.fail could nonetheless pull secrets from the AMD TEE.

The Cloudflare theft protection, meanwhile, relies on SME—the engine driving SEV-SNP encryption. The researchers didn’t directly test SME against TEE.fail. They did note that SME uses deterministic encryption, the cryptographic property that causes all three TEEs to fail. (More about the role of deterministic encryption later.)

Others who misstate the TEEs’ protections provide more accurate descriptions elsewhere. Given all the conflicting information, it’s no wonder there’s confusion.

How do you know where the server is? You don’t.

Many TEE users run their infrastructure inside cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, or Google, where protections against supply-chain and physical attacks are extremely robust. That raises the bar for a TEE.fail-style attack significantly. (Whether the services could be compelled by governments with valid subpoenas to attack their own TEE is not clear.)

All these caveats notwithstanding, there’s often (1) little discussion of the growing viability of cheap, physical attacks, (2) no evidence (yet) that implementations not vulnerable to the three attacks won’t fall to follow-on research, or (3) no way for parties relying on TEEs to know where the servers are running and whether they’re free from physical compromise.

“We don’t know where the hardware is,” Daniel Genkin, one of the researchers behind both TEE.fail and Wiretap, said in an interview. “From a user perspective, I don’t even have a way to verify where the server is. Therefore, I have no way to verify if it’s in a reputable facility or an attacker’s basement.”

In other words, parties relying on attestations from servers in the cloud are once again reduced to simply trusting other people’s computers. As Moore observed, solving that problem is precisely the reason TEEs exist.

In at least two cases, involving the blockchain services Secret Network and Crust, the loss of TEE protections made it possible for any untrusted user to present cryptographic attestations. Both platforms used the attestations to verify that a blockchain node operated by one user couldn’t tamper with the execution or data passing to another user’s nodes. The Wiretap hack on SGX made it possible for users to run the sensitive data and executions outside of the TEE altogether while still providing attestations to the contrary. In the AMD attack, the attacker could decrypt the traffic passing through the TEE.

Both Secret Network and Crust added mitigations after learning of the possible physical attacks with Wiretap and Battering RAM. Given the lack of clear messaging, other TEE users are likely making similar mistakes.

A predetermined weakness

The root cause of all three physical attacks is the choice of deterministic encryption. This form of encryption produces the same ciphertext each time the same plaintext is encrypted with the same key. A TEE.fail attacker can copy ciphertext strings and use them in replay attacks. (Probabilistic encryption, by contrast, resists such attacks because the same plaintext can encrypt to a wide range of ciphertexts that are randomly chosen during the encryption process.)

TEE.fail works not only against SGX but also a more advanced Intel TEE known as TDX. The attack also defeats the protections provided by the latest Nvidia Confidential Compute and AMD SEV-SNP TEEs. Attacks against TDX and SGX can extract the Attestation Key, an ECDSA secret that certifies to a remote party that it’s running up-to-date software and can’t expose data or execution running inside the enclave. This Attestation Key is in turn signed by an Intel X.509 digital certificate providing cryptographic assurances that the ECDSA key can be trusted. TEE.fail works against all Intel CPUs currently supporting TDX and SDX.

With possession of the key, the attacker can use the compromised server to peer into data or tamper with the code flowing through the enclave and send the relying party an assurance that the device is secure. With this key, even CPUs built by other chipmakers can send an attestation that the hardware is protected by the Intel TEEs.

GPUs equipped with Nvidia Confidential Compute don’t bind attestation reports to the specific virtual machine protected by a specific GPU. TEE.fail exploits this weakness by “borrowing” a valid attestation report from a GPU run by the attacker and using it to impersonate the GPU running Confidential Compute. The protection is available on Nvidia’s H100/200 and B100/200 server GPUs.

“This means that we can convince users that their applications (think private chats with LLMs or Large Language Models) are being protected inside the GPU’s TEE while in fact it is running in the clear,” the researchers wrote on a website detailing the attack. “As the attestation report is ‘borrowed,’ we don’t even own a GPU to begin with.”

SEV-SNP (Secure Encrypted Virtualization-Secure Nested Paging) uses ciphertext hiding in AMD’s EPYC CPUs based on the Zen 5 architecture. AMD added it to prevent a previous attack known as Cipherleaks, which allowed malicious hypervisors to extract cryptographic keys stored in the enclaves of a virtual machine. Ciphertext, however, doesn’t stop physical attacks. With the ability to reopen the side channel that Cipherleaks relies on, TEE.fail can steal OpenSSL credentials and other key material based on constant-time encryption.

Cheap, quick, and the size of a briefcase

“Now that we have interpositioned DDR5 traffic, our work shows that even the most modern of TEEs across all vendors with available hardware is vulnerable to cheap physical attacks,” Genkin said.

The equipment required by TEE.fail runs off-the-shelf gear that costs less than $1,000. One of the devices the researchers built fits into a 17-inch briefcase, so it can be smuggled into a facility housing a TEE-protected server. Once the physical attack is performed, the device does not need to be connected again. Attackers breaking TEEs on servers they operate have no need for stealth, allowing them to use a larger device, which the researchers also built.

A logic analyzer attached to an interposer.

The researchers demonstrated attacks against an array of services that rely on the chipmakers’ TEE protections. (For ethical reasons, the attacks were carried out against infrastructure that was identical to but separate from the targets’ networks.) Some of the attacks included BuilderNet, dstack, and Secret Network.

BuilderNet is a network of Ethereum block builders that uses TDX to prevent parties from snooping on others’ data and to ensure fairness and that proof currency is redistributed honestly. The network builds blocks valued at millions of dollars each month.

“We demonstrated that a malicious operator with an attestation key could join BuilderNet and obtain configuration secrets, including the ability to decrypt confidential orderflow and access the Ethereum wallet for paying validators,” the TEE.fail website explained. “Additionally, a malicious operator could build arbitrary blocks or frontrun (i.e., construct a new transaction with higher fees to ensure theirs is executed first) the confidential transactions for profit while still providing deniability.”

To date, the researchers said, BuilderNet hasn’t provided mitigations. Attempts to reach BuilderNet officials were unsuccessful.

dstack is a tool for building confidential applications that run on top of virtual machines protected by Nvidia Confidential Compute. The researchers used TEE.fail to forge attestations certifying that a workload was performed by the TDX using the Nvidia protection. It also used the “borrowed” attestations to fake ownership of GPUs that a relying party trusts.

Secret Network is a platform billing itself as the “first mainnet blockchain with privacy-preserving smart contracts,” in part by encrypting on-chain data and execution with SGX. The researchers showed that TEE.fail could extract the “Concensus Seed,” the primary network-side private key encrypting confidential transactions on the Secret Network. As noted, after learning of Wiretap, the Secret Network eliminated this possibility by establishing a “curated” allowlist of known, trusted nodes allowed on the network and suspended the acceptance of new nodes. Academic or not, the ability to replicate the attack using TEE.fail shows that Wiretap wasn’t a one-off success.

A tough nut to crack

As explained earlier, the root cause of all the TEE.fail attacks is deterministic encryption, which forms the basis for protections in all three chipmakers’ TEEs. This weaker form of encryption wasn’t always used in TEEs. When Intel initially rolled out SGX, the feature was put in client CPUs, not server ones, to prevent users from building devices that could extract copyrighted content such as high-definition video.

Those early versions encrypted no more than 256MB of RAM, a small enough space to use the much stronger probabilistic form of encryption. The TEEs built into server chips, by contrast, must often encrypt terabytes of RAM. Probabilistic encryption doesn’t scale to that size without serious performance penalties. Finding a solution that accommodates this overhead won’t be easy.

One mitigation over the short term is to ensure that each 128-bit block of ciphertext has sufficient entropy. Adding random plaintext to the blocks prevents ciphertext repetition. The researchers say the entropy can be added by building a custom memory layout that inserts a 64-bit counter with a random initial value to each 64-bit block before encrypting it.

The last countermeasure the researchers proposed is adding location verification to the attestation mechanism. While insider and supply chain attacks remain a possibility inside even the most reputable cloud services, strict policies make them much less feasible. Even those mitigations, however, don’t foreclose the threat of a government agency with a valid subpoena ordering an organization to run such an attack inside their network.

In a statement, Nvidia said:

NVIDIA is aware of this research. Physical controls in addition to trust controls such as those provided by Intel TDX reduce the risk to GPUs for this style of attack, based on our discussions with the researchers. We will provide further details once the research is published.

Intel spokesman Jerry Bryant said:

Fully addressing physical attacks on memory by adding more comprehensive confidentiality, integrity and anti-replay protection results in significant trade-offs to Total Cost of Ownership. Intel continues to innovate in this area to find acceptable solutions that offer better balance between protections and TCO trade-offs.

The company has published responses here and here reiterating that physical attacks are out of scope for both TDX and SGX

AMD didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Stuck on Band-Aids

For now, TEE.fail, Wiretap, and Battering RAM remain a persistent threat that isn’t solved with the use of default implementations of the chipmakers’ secure enclaves. The most effective mitigation for the time being is for TEE users to understand the limitations and curb uses that the chipmakers say aren’t a part of the TEE threat model. Secret Network tightening requirements for operators joining the network is an example of such a mitigation.

Moore, the founder and CEO of RunZero, said that companies with big budgets can rely on custom solutions built by larger cloud services. AWS, for example, makes use of the Nitro Card, which is built using ASIC chips that accelerate processing using TEEs. Google’s proprietary answer is Titanium.

“It’s a really hard problem,” Moore said. “I’m not sure what the current state of the art is, but if you can’t afford custom hardware, the best you can do is rely on the CPU provider’s TEE, and this research shows how weak this is from the perspective of an attacker with physical access. The enclave is really a Band-Aid or hardening mechanism over a really difficult problem, and it’s both imperfect and dangerous if compromised, for all sorts of reasons.”

Dan Goodin is Senior Security Editor at Ars Technica, where he oversees coverage of malware, computer espionage, botnets, hardware hacking, encryption, and passwords. In his spare time, he enjoys gardening, cooking, and following the independent music scene. Dan is based in San Francisco. Follow him at here on Mastodon and here on Bluesky. Contact him on Signal at DanArs.82.

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This browser claims “perfect privacies protection,” but it acts like malware

malware, Security, syndicated, Universe Browser, web browsers / Kelly Newman / October 24, 2025

Researchers note links to Asia’s booming cybercrime and illegal gambling networks.

This looks like a 100 percent above-board product, right? Right? Credit: Ars Technica

The Universe Browser makes some big promises to its potential users. Its online advertisements claim it’s the “fastest browser,” that people using it will “avoid privacy leaks” and that the software will help “keep you away from danger.” However, everything likely isn’t as it seems.

The browser, which is linked to Chinese online gambling websites and is thought to have been downloaded millions of times, actually routes all Internet traffic through servers in China and “covertly installs several programs that run silently in the background,” according to new findings from network security company Infoblox. The researchers say the “hidden” elements include features similar to malware—including “key logging, surreptitious connections,” and changing a device’s network connections.

Perhaps most significantly, the Infoblox researchers who collaborated with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) on the work, found links between the browser’s operation and Southeast Asia’s sprawling, multibillion-dollar cybercrime ecosystem, which has connections to money-laundering, illegal online gambling, human trafficking, and scam operations that use forced labor. The browser itself, the researchers says, is directly linked to a network around major online gambling company BBIN, which the researchers have labeled a threat group they call Vault Viper.

The researchers say the discovery of the browser—plus its suspicious and risky behavior—indicates that criminals in the region are becoming increasingly sophisticated. “These criminal groups, particularly Chinese organized crimes syndicates, are increasingly diversifying and evolving into cyber enabled fraud, pig butchering, impersonation, scams, that whole ecosystem,” says John Wojcik, a senior threat researcher at Infoblox, who also worked on the project when he was a staff member at the UNODC.

“They’re going to continue to double down, reinvest profits, develop new capabilities,” Wojcik says. “The threat is ultimately becoming more serious and concerning, and this is one example of where we see that.”

Under the hood

The Universe Browser was first spotted—and mentioned by name—by Infoblox and UNODC at the start of this year when they began unpacking the digital systems around an online casino operation based in Cambodia, which was previously raided by law enforcement officials. Infoblox, which specializes in domain name system (DNS) management and security, detected a unique DNS fingerprint from those systems that they linked to Vault Viper, making it possible for the researchers to trace and map websites and infrastructure linked to the group.

Tens of thousands of web domains, plus various command-and-control infrastructure and registered companies, are linked to Vault Viper activity, Infoblox researchers say in a report shared with WIRED. They also say they examined hundreds of pages of corporate documents, legal records, and court filings with links to BBIN or other subsidiaries. Time and time again, they came across the Universe Browser online.

“We haven’t seen the Universe Browser advertised outside of the domains Vault Viper controls,” says Maël Le Touz, a threat researcher at Infoblox. The Infoblox report says the browser was “specifically” designed to help people in Asia—where online gambling is largely illegal—bypass restrictions. “Each of the casino websites they operate seem to contain a link and advertisement to it,” Le Touz says.

The Universe Browser itself is mostly offered for direct download from these casino websites—often being linked at the bottom of the websites, next to the logo of BBIN. There are desktop versions available for Windows, as well as an app version in Apple’s App Store. And while it is not in Google’s Play Store, there are Android APK files that allow the app to be directly installed on Android phones. The researchers say multiple parts of the Universe Browser and the code for its apps reference BBIN, and other technical details also reference the company.

The researchers reverse-engineered the Windows version of the browser. They say that while they have been unable to “verify malicious intent,” elements of the browser that they uncovered include many features that are similar to those found malware and tries to evade detection by antivirus tools. When the browser is launched, it “immediately” checks for the user’s location, language, and whether it is running in a virtual machine. The app also installs two browser extensions: one of which can allow screenshots to be uploaded to domains linked to the browser.

While online gambling in China is largely illegal, the country also runs some of the world’s strictest online censorship operations and has taken action against illegal gambling rings. While the browser may most often be being used by those trying to take part in illegal gambling, it also puts their data at risk, the researchers say. “In the hands of a malicious actor—a Triad for example—this browser would serve as the perfect tool to identify wealthy players and obtain access to their machine,” the Infoblox report says.

Beyond connecting to China, running key logging, and other programs that run in the background, Infoblox’s report also says multiple functions have been disabled. “The right click, settings access and developer tools, for instance, have all been removed, while the browser itself is run with several flags disabling major security features including sandboxing, and the removal of legacy SSL protocols, greatly increasing risk when compared with typical mainstream browsers,” the company’s report says. (SSL, also known as Secure Sockets Layer, is a historic type of web encryption that protected some data transfers.)

It is unclear whether these same suspicious behaviors are present in the iOS and Android versions of the app. A Google spokesperson says the company is looking into the app and confirmed it was not available through its Google Play store. Apple did not respond to requests for comment about the app.

Connect the dots

The web infrastructure around the Universe Browser led the researchers back to BBIN, a company that has existed since 1999. While it was originally founded in Taiwan, the company now has a large base in the Philippines.

BBIN, which also goes by the name Baoying Group and has multiple subsidies, describes itself as a “leading” supplier of iGaming software in Asia. A UNODC report from April, which links BBIN to the Universe Browser but does not formally name the company as Vault Viper, says the firm runs several hotels and casinos in Southeast Asia as well as providing “one of the largest and most successful” iGaming platforms in the region. Over the last decade, BBIN has sponsored or partnered with multiple major European soccer teams, such as Spain’s Atlético de Madrid, Germany’s Borussia Dortmund, and Dutch team AFC Ajax.

In recent years, multiple football clubs in England’s Premier League have faced scrutiny over sponsorship by Asian gambling companies—including by TGP Europe, which was owned by Alvin Chau, the chairman and founder of SunCity Group, who was sentenced in January 2023 to 18 years in prison after being found guilty of running illegal gambling operations. TGP Europe left the UK earlier this year after being fined by the country’s gambling regulator. Atlético Madrid, Borussia Dortmund, and AFC Ajax did not respond to WIRED requests for comment.

The iGaming industry develops online gambling software, such as virtual poker or other online casino games, that can easily be played on the web or on phones. “BBIN Baoying is officially an online casino game developer or ‘white label’ online casino platform, meaning it outsources its online gambling technology to other sites,” says Lindsey Kennedy, research director at The EyeWitness Project, which investigates corruption and organized crime. “The only languages it offers are Korean, Japanese, and Chinese, which isn’t a great sign as online gambling is either banned or heavily restricted in all three countries.”

“Baoying and BBIN are what I would call a multi-billion dollar gray-area international conglomerate with deep criminal connections, backstopping and providing services to online gambling businesses, scams and cybercrime actors,” alleges Jeremy Douglas, chief of staff at the UNODC and its former regional representative for Southeast Asia. “Aside from what has been estimated at a two-thirds ownership by Alvin Chau of SunCity—arguably the biggest money launderer in the history of Asia—law enforcement partners have documented direct connections with Triad groups including the Bamboo Union, Four Seas, Tian Dao,” Douglas says of BBIN. (When Chau was sentenced in January 2023, court documents pointed to him allegedly owning a 66.67 percent share of Baoying).

BBIN did not respond to multiple requests for comment from WIRED. The firm’s primary contact email address it lists on its website bounced back, while questions sent to another email address and online contact forms, plus attempts to contact two alleged staff members on LinkedIn were not answered by the time of publication. A company Telegram account pointed WIRED to one of the contact forms that did not provide any answers.

The Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission (PAOCC) in the Philippines, which tackles organized and international crimes, did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED about BBIN.

Over the last decade, online crime in Southeast Asia has massively surged, driven partially by illegal online gambling and also a series of scam compoundsthat have been set up across Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia. Hundreds of thousands of people from more than 60 countries have been tricked into working in these compounds, where they operate scams day and night, stealing billions of dollars from people around the world.

“Scam parks and compounds across the region generally host both online gambling and online scam operations, and the methodology used to lure individuals into opening online gambling accounts parallels that associated with pig-butchering scams,” says Jason Tower, a senior expert at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.

Last week, US law enforcement seized $15 billion in Bitcoin from one giant Cambodian organization, which publicly dealt in real estate but allegedly ran scam facilities in “secret.” One of the sanctioned entities, the Jin Bei Group in Cambodia, which US authorities accused of operating a series of scam compounds, also shows links to BBIN’s technology, Tower says. “There are multiple Telegram groups and casino websites indicating that BBIN partners with multiple entities inside the Jinbei casino,” Tower says, adding that one group on Telegram “posts daily advertisements indicating an official partnership between Jinbei and BBIN.”

Over recent years, multiple government press releases and news reports from countries including China and Taiwan, have alleged how BBIN’s technology has been used within illegal gambling operations and linked to cybercrime. “There are hundreds of Telegram posts aggressively advertising various illegal Chinese facing gambling sites that say they either are, or are built on, BBIN/Baoying technology, many of them by individuals claiming to operate out of scam and illegal gambling compounds, or as part of the highly illegal, trafficking-driven industry in Cambodia and Northern Myanmar,” says Kennedy from The EyeWitness Project.

While the Universe Browser has most likely been downloaded by those accessing Chinese-language gambling websites, researchers say that its development indicates how pivotal and lucrative illegal online gambling operations are and exposing their links to scamming efforts that operate across the world. “As these operations continue to scale and diversify, they are marked by growing technical expertise, professionalization, operational resilience, and the ability to function under the radar with very limited scrutiny and oversight,” Infoblox’s report concludes.

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture.

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Jaguar Land Rover looking at $2.5 billion price tag from crippling cyberattack

Cars, cybercrime, Jaguar Land Rover, ransomware, Security / Mike M. / October 22, 2025

The CMC estimated in June that the financial impact of the attacks on the two retailers was between £270 million and £440 million.

The investigation into the JLR attack is being led by the National Crime Agency but few details have emerged on who was behind the incident. The CMC estimate did not include assumptions about whether JLR had paid a ransom or not.

Martin said companies tended to focus their resources on protecting themselves against data breaches since they have a legal obligation to protect customer data.

But cases like JLR underscore the increasing risks of attackers not just stealing data but destroying critical networks supporting a company’s operations, and the high costs associated with such attacks.

While state actors have not been behind recent attacks on M&S and other retailers, Martin warned that there was an increasing “geopolitical vulnerability” and risk that hostile nation states could attack UK businesses for non-financial reasons.

“It is now clear not just that criminal disruptive attacks are the worst problem in cybersecurity right now, but they’re a playbook to hostile nation states on how to attack us,” Martin said at a separate speech in London on Wednesday. “So cybersecurity has become economic security. And economic security is national security.”

Last week, the UK National Cyber Security Centre also warned that state actors continued to pose “a significant threat” to Britain and global cyber security, citing the risks posed by China, Russia, and others.

According to an annual review by NCSC, the UK had suffered 204 “nationally significant [cyber] incidents” in the 12 months to August 2025, compared with 89 in the same period a year earlier.

The term is used to describe the three most serious types of incidents as defined by UK law enforcement.

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NSO permanently barred from targeting WhatsApp users with Pegasus spyware

Biz & IT, espionage, NSO, pegasus, Policy, Security / Kelly Newman / October 21, 2025

A federal judge has ordered spyware maker NSO to stop using its Pegasus app to target or infect users of WhatsApp.

The ruling, issued Friday by Phyllis J. Hamilton of the US District Court of the District of Northern California, grants a permanent injunction sought by WhatsApp owner Meta in a case it brought against NSO in 2019. The lawsuit alleged that Meta caught NSO trying to surreptitiously infect about 1,400 mobile phones—many belonging to attorneys, journalists, human-rights activists, political dissidents, diplomats, and senior foreign government officials—with Pegasus. As part of the campaign, NSO created fake WhatsApp accounts and targeted Meta infrastructure. The suit sought monetary awards and an injunction against the practice.

Setting a precedent

Friday’s ruling ordered NSO to permanently cease targeting WhatsApp users, attempting to infect their devices, or intercepting WhatsApp messages, which are end-to-end encrypted using the open source Signal Protocol. Hamilton also ruled that NSO must delete any data it obtained when targeting the WhatsApp users.

NSO had argued that such a ruling would “force NSO out of business,” as Pegasus is its “flagship product.” Hamilton ruled that the harm Pegasus posed to Meta outweighed any such considerations.

“In the court’s view, any business that deals with users’ personal information, and that invests resources into ways to encrypt that personal information, is harmed by the unauthorized access of that personal information—and it is more than just a reputational harm, it’s a business harm,” Hamilton wrote. “Essentially, part of what companies such as Whatsapp are ‘selling’ is informational privacy, and any unauthorized access is an interference with that sale. Defendants’ conduct serves to defeat one of the purposes of the service being offered by plaintiffs, which constitutes direct harm.”

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Nation-state hackers deliver malware from “bulletproof” blockchains

Biz & IT, Blockchain, hacking, malware, Security / DJ Henderson / October 18, 2025

Hacking groups—at least one of which works on behalf of the North Korean government—have found a new and inexpensive way to distribute malware from “bulletproof” hosts: stashing them on public cryptocurrency blockchains.

In a Thursday post, members of the Google Threat Intelligence Group said the technique provides the hackers with their own “bulletproof” host, a term that describes cloud platforms that are largely immune from takedowns by law enforcement and pressure from security researchers. More traditionally, these hosts are located in countries without treaties agreeing to enforce criminal laws from the US and other nations. These services often charge hefty sums and cater to criminals spreading malware or peddling child sexual abuse material and wares sold in crime-based flea markets.

Next-gen, DIY hosting that can’t be tampered with

Since February, Google researchers have observed two groups turning to a newer technique to infect targets with credential stealers and other forms of malware. The method, known as EtherHiding, embeds the malware in smart contracts, which are essentially apps that reside on blockchains for Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies. Two or more parties then enter into an agreement spelled out in the contract. When certain conditions are met, the apps enforce the contract terms in a way that, at least theoretically, is immutable and independent of any central authority.

“In essence, EtherHiding represents a shift toward next-generation bulletproof hosting, where the inherent features of blockchain technology are repurposed for malicious ends,” Google researchers Blas Kojusner, Robert Wallace, and Joseph Dobson wrote. “This technique underscores the continuous evolution of cyber threats as attackers adapt and leverage new technologies to their advantage.”

There’s a wide array of advantages to EtherHiding over more traditional means of delivering malware, which besides bulletproof hosting include leveraging compromised servers.

- The decentralization prevents takedowns of the malicious smart contracts because the mechanisms in the blockchains bar the removal of all such contracts.
- Similarly, the immutability of the contracts prevents the removal or tampering with the malware by anyone.
- Transactions on Ethereum and several other blockchains are effectively anonymous, protecting the hackers’ identities.
- Retrieval of malware from the contracts leaves no trace of the access in event logs, providing stealth
- The attackers can update malicious payloads at anytime

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Thousands of customers imperiled after nation-state ransacks F5’s network

big-ip, Biz & IT, breach, f5, Security / Kelly Newman / October 16, 2025

Customers position BIG-IP at the very edge of their networks for use as load balancers and firewalls, and for inspection and encryption of data passing into and out of networks. Given BIG-IP’s network position and its role in managing traffic for web servers, previous compromises have allowed adversaries to expand their access to other parts of an infected network.

F5 said that investigations by two outside intrusion-response firms have yet to find any evidence of supply-chain attacks. The company attached letters from firms IOActive and NCC Group attesting that analyses of source code and build pipeline uncovered no signs that a “threat actor modified or introduced any vulnerabilities into the in-scope items.” The firms also said they didn’t identify any evidence of critical vulnerabilities in the system. Investigators, which also included Mandiant and CrowdStrike, found no evidence that data from its CRM, financial, support case management, or health systems was accessed.

The company released updates for its BIG-IP, F5OS, BIG-IQ, and APM products. CVE designations and other details are here. Two days ago, F5 rotated BIG-IP signing certificates, though there was no immediate confirmation that the move is in response to the breach.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security agency has warned that federal agencies that rely on the appliance face an “imminent threat” from the thefts, which “pose an unacceptable risk.” The agency went on to direct federal agencies under its control to take “emergency action.” The UK’s National Cyber Security Center issued a similar directive.

CISA has ordered all federal agencies it oversees to immediately take inventory of all BIG-IP devices in networks they run or in networks that outside providers run on their behalf. The agency went on to direct agencies to install the updates and follow a threat-hunting guide that F5 has also issued. BIG-IP users in private industry should do the same.

Thousands of customers imperiled after nation-state ransacks F5’s network Read More »

NATO boss mocks Russian navy, which is on the hunt for Red October “the nearest mechanic”

Cyberattacks, russia, Russian navy, Security, submarine / Shannon Garcia / October 15, 2025

When one of its Kilo-class diesel-electric submarines recently surfaced off the coast of France, Russia denied that there was a problem with the vessel. The sub was simply surfacing to comply with maritime transit rules governing the English Channel, the Kremlin said—Russia being, of course, a noted follower of international law.

But social media accounts historically linked to Russian security forces suggested a far more serious problem on the submarine Novorossiysk. According to The Maritime Executive, “Rumors began to circulate on well-informed social media channels that the Novorossiysk had suffered a fuel leak. They suggested the vessel lacked onboard capabilities and was forced to surface to empty flooded compartments. Some reports said it was a dangerous fuel leak aboard the vessel, which was commissioned in 2012.”

France 24 quoted further social media reports as saying, “The submarine has neither the spare parts nor the qualified specialists onboard to fix the malfunction,” and it “now poses an explosion hazard.”

When the Novorossiysk surfaced off the coast of France a few days ago, it headed north and was promptly shadowed by a French warship, then an English ship, and finally a Dutch hydrographic recording vessel and an NH90 combat helicopter. The Dutch navy said in a statement that the Novorossiysk and “the tugboat Yakov Grebelskiy,” which was apparently towing it, have left the Dutch Exclusive Economic Zone. Although Russian ships have the right to transit international waters, the Dutch wanted to show “vigilance” in “preventing Russian ships from sabotaging submarine infrastructure.”

NATO boss mocks Russian navy, which is on the hunt for Red October “the nearest mechanic” Read More »

Hackers can steal 2FA codes and private messages from Android phones

android, Biz & IT, Google, pixnapping, privacy, Security, side channel / 9u50fv / October 14, 2025

STEALING CODES ONE PIXEL AT A TIME

Malicious app required to make “Pixnapping” attack work requires no permissions.

Samsung’s S25 phones. Credit: Samsung

Android devices are vulnerable to a new attack that can covertly steal two-factor authentication codes, location timelines, and other private data in less than 30 seconds.

The new attack, named Pixnapping by the team of academic researchers who devised it, requires a victim to first install a malicious app on an Android phone or tablet. The app, which requires no system permissions, can then effectively read data that any other installed app displays on the screen. Pixnapping has been demonstrated on Google Pixel phones and the Samsung Galaxy S25 phone and likely could be modified to work on other models with additional work. Google released mitigations last month, but the researchers said a modified version of the attack works even when the update is installed.

Like taking a screenshot

Pixnapping attacks begin with the malicious app invoking Android programming interfaces that cause the authenticator or other targeted apps to send sensitive information to the device screen. The malicious app then runs graphical operations on individual pixels of interest to the attacker. Pixnapping then exploits a side channel that allows the malicious app to map the pixels at those coordinates to letters, numbers, or shapes.

“Anything that is visible when the target app is opened can be stolen by the malicious app using Pixnapping,” the researchers wrote on an informational website. “Chat messages, 2FA codes, email messages, etc. are all vulnerable since they are visible. If an app has secret information that is not visible (e.g., it has a secret key that is stored but never shown on the screen), that information cannot be stolen by Pixnapping.”

The new attack class is reminiscent of GPU.zip, a 2023 attack that allowed malicious websites to read the usernames, passwords, and other sensitive visual data displayed by other websites. It worked by exploiting side channels found in GPUs from all major suppliers. The vulnerabilities that GPU.zip exploited have never been fixed. Instead, the attack was blocked in browsers by limiting their ability to open iframes, an HTML element that allows one website (in the case of GPU.zip, a malicious one) to embed the contents of a site from a different domain.

Pixnapping targets the same side channel as GPU.zip, specifically the precise amount of time it takes for a given frame to be rendered on the screen.

“This allows a malicious app to steal sensitive information displayed by other apps or arbitrary websites, pixel by pixel,” Alan Linghao Wang, lead author of the research paper “Pixnapping: Bringing Pixel Stealing out of the Stone Age,” explained in an interview. “Conceptually, it is as if the malicious app was taking a screenshot of screen contents it should not have access to. Our end-to-end attacks simply measure the rendering time per frame of the graphical operations… to determine whether the pixel was white or non-white.”

Pixnapping in three steps

The attack occurs in three main steps. In the first, the malicious app invokes Android APIs that make calls to the app the attacker wants to snoop on. These calls can also be used to effectively scan an infected device for installed apps of interest. The calls can further cause the targeted app to display specific data it has access to, such as a message thread in a messaging app or a 2FA code for a specific site. This call causes the information to be sent to the Android rendering pipeline, the system that takes each app’s pixels so they can be rendered on the screen. The Android-specific calls made include activities, intents, and tasks.

In the second step, Pixnapping performs graphical operations on individual pixels that the targeted app sent to the rendering pipeline. These operations choose the coordinates of target pixels the app wants to steal and begin to check if the color of those coordinates is white or non-white or, more generally, if the color is c or non-c (for an arbitrary color c).

“Suppose, for example, [the attacker] wants to steal a pixel that is part of the screen region where a 2FA character is known to be rendered by Google Authenticator,” Wang said. “This pixel is either white (if nothing was rendered there) or non-white (if part of a 2FA digit was rendered there). Then, conceptually, the attacker wants to cause some graphical operations whose rendering time is long if the target victim pixel is non-white and short if it is white. The malicious app does this by opening some malicious activities (i.e., windows) in front of the victim app that was opened in Step 1.”

The third step measures the amount of time required at each coordinate. By combining the times for each one, the attack can rebuild the images sent to the rendering pipeline one pixel at a time.

As Ars reader hotball put it in the comments below:

Basically the attacker renders something transparent in front of the target app, then using a timing attack exploiting the GPU’s graphical data compression to try finding out the color of the pixels. It’s not something as simple as “give me the pixels of another app showing on the screen right now.” That’s why it takes time and can be too slow to fit within the 30 seconds window of the Google Authenticator app.

In an online interview, paper co-author Ricardo Paccagnella described the attack in more detail:

Step 1: The malicious app invokes a target app to cause some sensitive visual content to be rendered.

Step 2: The malicious app uses Android APIs to “draw over” that visual content and cause a side channel (in our case, GPU.zip) to leak as a function of the color of individual pixels rendered in Step 1 (e.g., activate only if the pixel color is c).

Step 3: The malicious app monitors the side effects of Step 2 to infer, e.g., if the color of those pixels was c or not, one pixel at a time.

Steps 2 and 3 can be implemented differently depending on the side channel that the attacker wants to exploit. In our instantiations on Google and Samsung phones, we exploited the GPU.zip side channel. When using GPU.zip, measuring the rendering time per frame was sufficient to determine if the color of each pixel is c or not. Future instantiations of the attack may use other side channels where controlling memory management and accessing fine-grained timers may be necessary (see Section 3.3 of the paper). Pixnapping would still work then: the attacker would just need to change how Steps 2 and 3 are implemented.

The amount of time required to perform the attack depends on several variables, including how many coordinates need to be measured. In some cases, there’s no hard deadline for obtaining the information the attacker wants to steal. In other cases—such as stealing a 2FA code—every second counts, since each one is valid for only 30 seconds. In the paper, the researchers explained:

To meet the strict 30-second deadline for the attack, we also reduce the number of samples per target pixel to 16 (compared to the 34 or 64 used in earlier attacks) and decrease the idle time between pixel leaks from 1.5 seconds to 70 milliseconds. To ensure that the attacker has the full 30 seconds to leak the 2FA code, our implementation waits for the beginning of a new 30-second global time interval, determined using the system clock.

… We use our end-to-end attack to leak 100 different 2FA codes from Google Authenticator on each of our Google Pixel phones. Our attack correctly recovers the full 6-digit 2FA code in 73%, 53%, 29%, and 53% of the trials on the Pixel 6, 7, 8, and 9, respectively. The average time to recover each 2FA code is 14.3, 25.8, 24.9, and 25.3 seconds for the Pixel 6, Pixel 7, Pixel 8, and Pixel 9, respectively. We are unable to leak 2FA codes within 30 seconds using our implementation on the Samsung Galaxy S25 device due to significant noise. We leave further investigation of how to tune our attack to work on this device to future work.

In an email, a Google representative wrote, “We issued a patch for CVE-2025-48561 in the September Android security bulletin, which partially mitigates this behavior. We are issuing an additional patch for this vulnerability in the December Android security bulletin. We have not seen any evidence of in-the-wild exploitation.”

Pixnapping is useful research in that it demonstrates the limitations of Google’s security and privacy assurances that one installed app can’t access data belonging to another app. The challenges in implementing the attack to steal useful data in real-world scenarios, however, are likely to be significant. In an age when teenagers can steal secrets from Fortune 500 companies simply by asking nicely, the utility of more complicated and limited attacks is probably of less value.

Post updated to add details about how the attack works.

Hackers can steal 2FA codes and private messages from Android phones Read More »

Why Signal’s post-quantum makeover is an amazing engineering achievement

Biz & IT, diffie-hellman elliptic curve, Features, ML-KEM, Module-Lattice-Based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism, post-quantum encryption, Security, signal messenger / 9u50fv / October 13, 2025

COMING TO A PHONE NEAR YOU

New design sets a high standard for post-quantum readiness.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

The encryption protecting communications against criminal and nation-state snooping is under threat. As private industry and governments get closer to building useful quantum computers, the algorithms protecting Bitcoin wallets, encrypted Web visits, and other sensitive secrets will be useless. No one doubts the day will come, but as the now-common joke in cryptography circles observes, experts have been forecasting this cryptocalypse will arrive in the next 15 to 30 years for the past 30 years.

The uncertainty has created something of an existential dilemma: Should network architects spend the billions of dollars required to wean themselves off quantum-vulnerable algorithms now, or should they prioritize their limited security budgets fighting more immediate threats such as ransomware and espionage attacks? Given the expense and no clear deadline, it’s little wonder that less than half of all TLS connections made inside the Cloudflare network and only 18 percent of Fortune 500 networks support quantum-resistant TLS connections. It’s all but certain that many fewer organizations still are supporting quantum-ready encryption in less prominent protocols.

Triumph of the cypherpunks

One exception to the industry-wide lethargy is the engineering team that designs the Signal Protocol, the open-source engine that powers the world’s most robust and resilient form of end-to-end encryption for multiple private chat apps, most notably the Signal Messenger. Eleven days ago, the nonprofit entity that develops the protocol, Signal Messenger LLC, published a 5,900-word write-up describing its latest updates that make Signal fully quantum-resistant.

The complexity and problem-solving required for making the Signal Protocol quantum safe are as daunting as just about any in modern-day engineering. The original Signal Protocol already resembled the inside of a fine Swiss timepiece, with countless gears, wheels, springs, hands, and other parts all interoperating in an intricate way. In less adept hands, mucking about with an instrument as complex as the Signal protocol could have led to shortcuts or unintended consequences that hurt performance, undoing what would otherwise be a perfectly running watch. Yet this latest post-quantum upgrade (the first one came in 2023) is nothing short of a triumph.

“This appears to be a solid, thoughtful improvement to the existing Signal Protocol,” said Brian LaMacchia, a cryptography engineer who oversaw Microsoft’s post-quantum transition from 2015 to 2022 and now works at Farcaster Consulting Group. “As part of this work, Signal has done some interesting optimization under the hood so as to minimize the network performance impact of adding the post-quantum feature.”

Of the multiple hurdles to clear, the most challenging was accounting for the much larger key sizes that quantum-resistant algorithms require. The overhaul here adds protections based on ML-KEM-768, an implementation of the CRYSTALS-Kyber algorithm that was selected in 2022 and formalized last year by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. ML-KEM is short for Module-Lattice-Based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism, but most of the time, cryptographers refer to it simply as KEM.

Ratchets, ping-pong, and asynchrony

Like the Elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) protocol that Signal has used since its start, KEM is a key encapsulation mechanism. Also known as a key agreement mechanism, it provides the means for two parties who have never met to securely agree on one or more shared secrets in the presence of an adversary who is monitoring the parties’ connection. RSA, ECDH, and other encapsulation algorithms have long been used to negotiate symmetric keys (almost always AES keys) in protocols including TLS, SSH, and IKE. Unlike ECDH and RSA, however, the much newer KEM is quantum-safe.

Key agreement in a protocol like TLS is relatively straightforward. That’s because devices connecting over TLS negotiate a key over a single handshake that occurs at the beginning of a session. The agreed-upon AES key is then used throughout the session. The Signal Protocol is different. Unlike TLS sessions, Signal sessions are protected by forward secrecy, a cryptographic property that ensures the compromise of a key used to encrypt a recent set of messages can’t be used to decrypt an earlier set of messages. The protocol also offers Post-Compromise Security, which protects future messages from past key compromises. While a TLS uses the same key throughout a session, keys within a Signal session constantly evolve.

To provide these confidentiality guarantees, the Signal Protocol updates secret key material each time a message party hits the send button or receives a message, and at other points, such as in graphical indicators that a party is currently typing and in the sending of read receipts. The mechanism that has made this constant key evolution possible over the past decade is what protocol developers call a “double ratchet.” Just as a traditional ratchet allows a gear to rotate in one direction but not in the other, the Signal ratchets allow messaging parties to create new keys based on a combination of preceding and newly agreed-upon secrets. The ratchets work in a single direction, the sending and receiving of future messages. Even if an adversary compromises a newly created secret, messages encrypted using older secrets can’t be decrypted.

The starting point is a handshake that performs three or four ECDH agreements that mix long- and short-term secrets to establish a shared secret. The creation of this “root key” allows the Double Ratchet to begin. Until 2023, the key agreement used X3DH. The handshake now uses PQXDH to make the handshake quantum-resistant.

The first layer of the Double Ratchet, the Symmetric Ratchet, derives an AES key from the root key and advances it for every message sent. This allows every message to be encrypted with a new secret key. Consequently, if attackers compromise one party’s device, they won’t be able to learn anything about the keys that came earlier. Even then, though, the attackers would still be able to compute the keys used in future messages. That’s where the second, “Diffie-Hellman ratchet” comes in.

The Diffie-Hellman ratchet incorporates a new ECDH public key into each message sent. Using Alice and Bob, the fictional characters often referred to when explaining asymmetric encryption, when Alice sends Bob a message, she creates a new ratchet keypair and computes the ECDH agreement between this key and the last ratchet public key Bob sent. This gives her a new secret, and she knows that once Bob gets her new public key, he will know this secret, too (because, as mentioned earlier, Bob previously sent that other key). With that, Alice can mix the new secret with her old root key to get a new root key and start fresh. The result: Attackers who learn her old secrets won’t be able to tell the difference between her new ratchet keys and random noise.

The result is what Signal developers describe as “ping-pong” behavior, as the parties to a discussion take turns replacing ratchet key pairs one at a time. The effect: An eavesdropper who compromises one of the parties might recover a current ratchet private key, but soon enough, that private key will be replaced with a new, uncompromised one, and in a way that keeps it free from the prying eyes of the attacker.

The objective of the newly generated keys is to limit the number of messages that can be decrypted if an adversary recovers key material at some point in an ongoing chat. Messages sent prior to and after the compromise will remain off limits.

A major challenge designers of the Signal Protocol face is the need to make the ratchets work in an asynchronous environment. Asynchronous messages occur when parties send or receive them at different times—such as while one is offline and the other is active, or vice versa—without either needing to be present or respond immediately. The entire Signal Protocol must work within this asynchronous environment. What’s more, it must work reliably over unstable networks and networks controlled by adversaries, such as a government that forces a telecom or cloud service to spy on the traffic.

Shor’s algorithm lurking

By all accounts, Signal’s double ratchet design is state-of-the-art. That said, it’s wide open to an inevitable if not immediate threat: quantum computing. That’s because an adversary capable of monitoring traffic passing from two or more messenger users can capture that data and feed it into a quantum computer—once one of sufficient power is viable—and calculate the ephemeral keys generated in the second ratchet.

In classical computing, it’s infeasible, if not impossible, for such an adversary to calculate the key. Like all asymmetric encryption algorithms, ECDH is based on a mathematical, one-way function. Also known as trapdoor functions, these problems are trivial to compute in one direction and substantially harder to compute in reverse. In elliptic curve cryptography, this one-way function is based on the Discrete Logarithm problem in mathematics. The key parameters are based on specific points in an elliptic curve over the field of integers modulo some prime P.

On average, an adversary equipped with only a classical computer would spend billions of years guessing integers before arriving at the right ones. A quantum computer, by contrast, would be able to calculate the correct integers in a matter of hours or days. A formula known as Shor’s algorithm—which runs only on a quantum computer—reverts this one-way discrete logarithm equation to a two-way one. Shor’s Algorithm can similarly make quick work of solving the one-way function that’s the basis for the RSA algorithm.

As noted earlier, the Signal Protocol received its first post-quantum makeover in 2023. This update added PQXDH—a Signal-specific implementation that combined the key agreements from elliptic curves used in X3DH (specifically X25519) and the quantum-safe KEM—in the initial protocol handshake. (X3DH was then put out to pasture as a standalone implementation.)

The move foreclosed the possibility of a quantum attack being able to recover the symmetric key used to start the ratchets, but the ephemeral keys established in the ping-ponging second ratchet remained vulnerable to a quantum attack. Signal’s latest update adds quantum resistance to these keys, ensuring that forward secrecy and post-compromise security are safe from Shor’s algorithm as well.

Even though the ping-ponging keys are vulnerable to future quantum attacks, they are broadly believed to be secure against today’s attacks from classical computers. The Signal Protocol developers didn’t want to remove them or the battle-tested code that produces them. That led to their decision to add quantum resistance by adding a third ratchet. This one uses a quantum-safe KEM to produce new secrets much like the Diffie-Hellman ratchet did before, ensuring quantum-safe, post-compromise security.

The technical challenges were anything but easy. Elliptic curve keys generated in the X25519 implementation are about 32 bytes long, small enough to be added to each message without creating a burden on already constrained bandwidths or computing resources. A ML-KEM 768 key, by contrast, is 1,000 bytes. Additionally, Signal’s design requires sending both an encryption key and a ciphertext, making the total size 2272 bytes.

And then there were three

To handle the 71x increase, Signal developers considered a variety of options. One was to send the 2272-byte KEM key less often—say every 50th message or once every week—rather than every message. That idea was nixed because it doesn’t work well in asynchronous or adversarial messaging environments. Signal Protocol developers Grame Connell and Rolfe Schmidt explained:

Consider the case of “send a key if you haven’t sent one in a week”. If Bob has been offline for 2 weeks, what does Alice do when she wants to send a message? What happens if we can lose messages, and we lose the one in fifty that contains a new key? Or, what happens if there’s an attacker in the middle that wants to stop us from generating new secrets, and can look for messages that are [many] bytes larger than the others and drop them, only allowing keyless messages through?

Another option Signal engineers considered was breaking the 2272-byte key into smaller chunks, say 71 of them that are 32 bytes each. Breaking up the KEM key into smaller chunks and putting one in each message sounds like a viable approach at first, but once again, the asynchronous environment of messaging made it unworkable. What happens, for example, when data loss causes one of the chunks to be dropped? The protocol could deal with this scenario by just repeat-sending chunks again after sending all 71 previously. But then an adversary monitoring the traffic could simply cause packet 3 to be dropped each time, preventing Alice and Bob from completing the key exchange.

Signal developers ultimately went with a solution that used this multiple-chunks approach.

Sneaking an elephant through the cat door

To manage the asynchrony challenges, the developers turned to “erasure codes,” a method of breaking up larger data into smaller pieces such that the original can be reconstructed using any sufficiently sized subset of chunks.

Charlie Jacomme, a researcher at INRIA Nancy on the Pesto team who focuses on formal verification and secure messaging, said this design accounts for packet loss by building redundancy into the chunked material. Instead of all x number of chunks having to be successfully received to reconstruct the key, the model requires only x-y chunks to be received, where y is the acceptable number of packets lost. As long as that threshold is met, the new key can be established even when packet loss occurs.

The other part of the design was to split the KEM computations into smaller steps. These KEM computations are distinct from the KEM key material.

As Jacomme explained it:

Essentially, a small part of the public key is enough to start computing and sending a bigger part of the ciphertext, so you can quickly send in parallel the rest of the public key and the beginning of the ciphertext. Essentially, the final computations are equal to the standard, but some stuff was parallelized.

All this in fact plays a role in the end security guarantees, because by optimizing the fact that KEM computations are done faster, you introduce in your key derivation fresh secrets more frequently.

Signal’s post 10 days ago included several images that illustrate this design:

While the design solved the asynchronous messaging problem, it created a new complication of its own: This new quantum-safe ratchet advanced so quickly that it couldn’t be kept synchronized with the Diffie-Hellman ratchet. Ultimately, the architects settled on a creative solution. Rather than bolt KEM onto the existing double ratchet, they allowed it to remain more or less the same as it had been. Then they used the new quantum-safe ratchet to implement a parallel secure messaging system.

Now, when the protocol encrypts a message, it sources encryption keys from both the classic Double Ratchet and the new ratchet. It then mixes the two keys together (using a cryptographic key derivation function) to get a new encryption key that has all of the security of the classical Double Ratchet but now has quantum security, too.

The Signal engineers have given this third ratchet the formal name: Sparse Post Quantum Ratchet, or SPQR for short. The third ratchet was designed in collaboration with PQShield, AIST, and New York University. The developers presented the erasure-code-based chunking and the high-level Triple Ratchet design at the Eurocrypt 2025 conference. At the Usenix 25 conference, they discussed the six options they considered for adding quantum-safe forward secrecy and post-compromise security and why SPQR and one other stood out. Presentations at the NIST PQC Standardization Conference and the Cryptographic Applications Workshop explain the details of chunking, the design challenges, and how the protocol had to be adapted to use the standardized ML-KEM.

Jacomme further observed:

The final thing interesting for the triple ratchet is that it nicely combines the best of both worlds. Between two users, you have a classical DH-based ratchet going on one side, and fully independently, a KEM-based ratchet is going on. Then, whenever you need to encrypt something, you get a key from both, and mix it up to get the actual encryption key. So, even if one ratchet is fully broken, be it because there is now a quantum computer, or because somebody manages to break either elliptic curves or ML-KEM, or because the implementation of one is flawed, or…, the Signal message will still be protected by the second ratchet. In a sense, this update can be seen, of course simplifying, as doubling the security of the ratchet part of Signal, and is a cool thing even for people that don’t care about quantum computers.

As both Signal and Jacomme noted, users of Signal and other messengers relying on the Signal Protocol need not concern themselves with any of these new designs. To paraphrase a certain device maker, it just works.

In the coming weeks or months, various messaging apps and app versions will be updated to add the triple ratchet. Until then, apps will simply rely on the double ratchet as they always did. Once apps receive the update, they’ll behave exactly as they did before upgrading.

For those who care about the internal workings of their Signal-based apps, though, the architects have documented in great depth the design of this new ratchet and how it behaves. Among other things, the work includes a mathematical proof verifying that the updated Signal protocol provides the claimed security properties.

Outside researchers are applauding the work.

“If the normal encrypted messages we use are cats, then post-quantum ciphertexts are elephants,” Matt Green, a cryptography expert at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in an interview. “So the problem here is to sneak an elephant through a tunnel designed for cats. And that’s an amazing engineering achievement. But it also makes me wish we didn’t have to deal with elephants.”

Why Signal’s post-quantum makeover is an amazing engineering achievement Read More »

Apple ups the reward for finding major exploits to $2 million

Apple, bug bounty, Security, syndication / Kelly Newman / October 11, 2025

Since launching its bug bounty program nearly a decade ago, Apple has always touted notable maximum payouts—$200,000 in 2016 and $1 million in 2019. Now the company is upping the stakes again. At the Hexacon offensive security conference in Paris on Friday, Apple vice president of security engineering and architecture Ivan Krstić announced a new maximum payout of $2 million for a chain of software exploits that could be abused for spyware.

The move reflects how valuable exploitable vulnerabilities can be within Apple’s highly protected mobile environment—and the lengths the company will go to to keep such discoveries from falling into the wrong hands. In addition to individual payouts, the company’s bug bounty also includes a bonus structure, adding additional awards for exploits that can bypass its extra secure Lockdown Mode as well as those discovered while Apple software is still in its beta testing phase. Taken together, the maximum award for what would otherwise be a potentially catastrophic exploit chain will now be $5 million. The changes take effect next month.

“We are lining up to pay many millions of dollars here, and there’s a reason,” Krstić tells WIRED. “We want to make sure that for the hardest categories, the hardest problems, the things that most closely mirror the kinds of attacks that we see with mercenary spyware—that the researchers who have those skills and abilities and put in that effort and time can get a tremendous reward.”

Apple says that there are more than 2.35 billion of its devices active around the world. The company’s bug bounty was originally an invite-only program for prominent researchers, but since opening to the public in 2020, Apple says that it has awarded more than $35 million to more than 800 security researchers. Top-dollar payouts are very rare, but Krstić says that the company has made multiple $500,000 payouts in recent years.

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Microsoft warns of new “Payroll Pirate” scam stealing employees’ direct deposits

Biz & IT, mfa, multi factor authentication, phishing, Security / Shannon Garcia / October 11, 2025

Microsoft is warning of an active scam that diverts employees’ paycheck payments to attacker-controlled accounts after first taking over their profiles on Workday or other cloud-based HR services.

Payroll Pirate, as Microsoft says the campaign has been dubbed, gains access to victims’ HR portals by sending them phishing emails that trick the recipients into providing their credentials for logging in to the cloud account. The scammers are able to recover multi-factor authentication codes by using adversary-in-the-middle tactics, which work by sitting between the victims and the site they think they’re logging in to, which is, in fact, a fake site operated by the attackers.

Not all MFA is created equal

The attackers then enter the intercepted credentials, including the MFA code, into the real site. This tactic, which has grown increasingly common in recent years, underscores the importance of adopting FIDO-compliant forms of MFA, which are immune to such attacks.

Once inside the employees’ accounts, the scammers make changes to payroll configurations within Workday. The changes cause direct-deposit payments to be diverted from accounts originally chosen by the employee and instead flow to an account controlled by the attackers. To block messages Workday automatically sends to users when such account details have been changed, the attackers create email rules that keep the messages from appearing in the inbox.

“The threat actor used realistic phishing emails, targeting accounts at multiple universities, to harvest credentials,” Microsoft said in a Thursday post. “Since March 2025, we’ve observed 11 successfully compromised accounts at three universities that were used to send phishing emails to nearly 6,000 email accounts across 25 universities.”

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