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15 stories in the last 7d

Differential Trust: Dynamic Multi-Authority Anonymous Credentials with Epoch-Weighted Updates

Researchers propose MA-ACEW, the first multi-authority anonymous credential model with epoch-weighted issuance and efficient cross-epoch credential updates.

The paper introduces MA-ACEW, a multi-authority anonymous credential scheme that weights authorities differently during credential issuance, targeting decentralized systems such as Proof-of-Stake networks. Its core primitive, Epoch-Bound Pointcheval-Sanders Signatures (EB-PS), binds signatures to time epochs, enabling non-interactive credential updates when authority weight distributions change. The authors formalize EUF-eCMA unforgeability and prove unforgeability, anonymity, and blindness under a novel STB-GPS assumption. Aggregating a credential from 128 partial credentials takes about 10.68 ms on average.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

Abandoned IoT apps keep sending sensitive data to broken servers

UMass Amherst researchers found 61,500 abandoned Android IoT apps send sensitive data to unreachable, blocklisted, or re-registered domains.

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst built a dataset of 61,500 abandoned IoT companion apps from AndroZoo and found 73.6% bundled dependencies with vulnerabilities listed in the National Vulnerability Database. About a quarter of extracted domains no longer resolved, roughly one in nine URLs matched threat-intelligence blocklists for phishing, scam, spyware, or malware links, and domains affecting over 2,000 apps had changed ownership since the apps' last update. 38.4% of unique data-flow sources and sinks in abandoned apps were tied to unreachable, blocklisted, or ownership-changed domains, versus under 1% in 500 actively maintained comparison apps. Disclosure emails prompted some app removals and fixes, including a Tuya SDK issue patched on the vendor's cloud platform.

Help Net Security · 8h agoResearch

Researchers Find Security Risks in 73.6% of 61,500 Abandoned IoT Apps

A study of 61,500 abandoned Android IoT companion apps found 73.6% contain vulnerable libraries, dead domains, or insecure data flows exposing sensitive user data.

The study 'When Apps Outlive Vendors: Security Implications of IoT Abandonware' analyzed 61,500 abandoned Android IoT companion apps, including 54,886 removed from Google Play and 6,614 unpatched since March 2023. 45,248 apps (73.6%) contained libraries with known CVEs, 67.6% of them rated High or Critical, though manual validation showed a 52.5% false-positive rate for CVE applicability. Researchers extracted 168,718 unique domains, 24.2% unreachable, and found 3,066 apps with malicious URLs, while 40.8% of unique data sinks flowed to dead, blocklisted, or ownership-changed infrastructure versus 0.4% for maintained apps.

GBHackers · 4h agoResearch

A heap overflow and SSO misconfiguration to compromise OpenAI internal repos

Hacktron researchers chained a libheif heap overflow in Discourse with an OpenAI SSO flaw to take over employee ChatGPT/Codex accounts and access internal repositories.

On July 25, 2026, Hacktron researchers chained a heap buffer overflow in libheif 1.19.7/1.19.8 (missing Debian security backports, upstream fix never assigned a CVE), reached through Discourse image uploads processed by ImageMagick, to gain remote code execution on community.openai.com. Combined with an SSO identity misconfiguration in the 'Sign in with OpenAI' flow, they took over employees' ChatGPT/Codex accounts with connected GitHub, Slack, and email access, and proved it by opening PR #1186742 in OpenAI's internal openai/openai monorepo. They reported the issues for coordinated patching, received a $6,500 bounty from OpenAI, and Debian shipped fixed libheif packages on August 8, 2026. The team used Claude Opus 4.8 and Claude Opus 5 to locate the missing backport and autonomously develop working x86-64/ARM64 exploits.

Hacker News · securityupdated · 35m agofirst · 11h agoResearch in the wild 9 sourcesHN 334↑ · 128 comments1

Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography

Apple introduces Reference Image, hardware-backed verifiable photography on iPhone 18 Pro using sensor signing and Private Cloud Compute to counter AI-generated fakes.

Apple announced Reference Image, an opt-in camera mode debuting on the main sensor of iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max that produces securely timestamped, verifiable photographs. The design splits into two phases: a secure digital negative created by cryptographically signing pixel data at the sensor immediately after capture (preventing injection or tampering), then developing that negative into a reference image. Private Cloud Compute handles processing without exposing image contents to anyone, including Apple, and fraudulent reference images can be revoked without revealing the photographer's identity. Apple positions the system as stronger than C2PA-based approaches, which sign metadata after capture, are vulnerable to editing-chain compromise, and can tie images to a device or individual.

Google’s New Search Redirects Make It Harder to Check Where Links Lead Before Clicking

Malwarebytes reports Google's new encoded google.com/goto?url= redirects break hover-preview link checking, weakening a common phishing defense.

Google now routes some search results through opaque google.com/goto?url= redirects using custom encoding, so browser link previews no longer reveal the true destination, only the claimed label above the result. Malwarebytes found the final destination is visible only in the redirect response's Location header, complicating hover-based safety checks as well as scraping, archiving, and audit tools. The change arrives amid malvertising, search-result poisoning, and fake installer campaigns like the recent Node.js infostealer lure. Google says it deploys measures against evolving abuse but did not explain the change.

Cyber Security News · 3d agoResearch

Turn it off and on again, but for critical infrastructure

KTH researchers trained a reinforcement-learning intrusion response agent on an emulated segmented OT network that autonomously resets hosts and processes to disrupt intruders.

Researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology built a containerized replica of a segmented industrial network, attacked it across 14 days, and captured 40,000 30-second traffic intervals to train a defense agent under partial observability. The agent observes six packet-count numbers per interval, maintains 500 running state hypotheses, and can reset supervisory hosts, water tank processes, or entire subnets, with resets rebooting the target, renewing credentials, and changing its IP. The best agent approached a full-visibility baseline but depends on an assumed attacker behavior model; the testbed comprised three supervisory hosts, two PLCs, two tanks, weak credentials, and CVE-2017-7494 exposure. The team released its implementation and plans validation on a real industrial testbed with a partner.

Help Net Security · 4d agoResearchCVE-2017-74942· 1 read

HTTP QUERY Method: The Grey Zone Between GET And POST., (Fri, Sep 18th)

RFC 10008 standardizes the HTTP QUERY method, creating potential WAF inspection bypasses, cache poisoning, and CSRF gaps because most defenses don't recognize the new verb.

The IETF published RFC 10008 in June 2026 defining HTTP QUERY, the first new standard method since PATCH in 2010, behaving as a safe, idempotent, explicitly cacheable GET whose query lives in the request body. SANS handler Xavier Mertens warns that WAF rules, API-gateway allowlists, CSRF middleware, and caches built around the classic verb set may not inspect QUERY bodies, allowing SQL injection or XSS payloads to bypass inspection where POST would be blocked. Behavior in the wild is inconsistent: nginx's limit_except silently rejects QUERY and never caches it, while curl, Caddy, Traefik, FastAPI explicit routes, and .NET 10 pass or support it, and Cloudflare/Akamai co-authored the RFC. The author found no QUERY requests in his logs yet and recommends updating method-matching rules and allowlists to include QUERY.

Fluid Notarization: Verifiable Evolution of Concurrently Edited Structured Documents

Fluid Notarization anchors delta-CRDT change graphs on blockchain, providing verifiable provenance for concurrently edited documents, demonstrated on collaborative electronic health records.

The paper introduces Fluid Notarization, a paradigm that notarizes the evolution of collaboratively edited structured documents rather than isolated snapshots. It builds on Melda, a JSON-native delta-CRDT representing changes as compact content-addressed deltas linked by causal dependencies, with blockchain notarization reduced to recording identifiers of evolution artifacts while synchronization, reconstruction, and conflict resolution remain off-chain. The architecture combines deterministic CRDT convergence with independently auditable proof-of-existence, provenance, and publication evidence, validated through a prototype based on collaboratively edited electronic health records.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

Hackers Stole Flock’s Camera Software, Revealing How the Company Tracks Cars and People

Hackers who removed a Flock Safety license plate camera dumped its data, revealing person-detection capabilities and an encryption key stored unencrypted on the device.

A hacker collective calling itself stegan0gram physically removed a Flock Safety automatic license plate reader camera from a roadway, copied its storage, and shared the files with 404 Media, WIRED, and Distributed Denial of Secrets. Analysis found an encryption key in an unencrypted 'media' partition that unlocked videos of thousands of vehicle detections, with logs showing more than a million images generated in weeks. The software explicitly detects people, bicycles, and even bumper stickers, and records from one Georgia city were searchable by more than 2,000 agencies nationwide. The findings follow 2025 research by Jon Gaines documenting flaws enabling root-level access to Flock cameras.

404 Mediaupdated · 19h agofirst · 2d agoResearch in the wild 6 sources

Autonomy in Check: Governor-Mediated Adaptive Security at the Edge

Split-control architecture adds a deterministic governor to validate LLM and rule-based planner intents before eBPF enforcement at the edge.

Researchers propose a split-control edge security architecture in which an untrusted planner emits typed security intents that a deterministic governor checks against safety, resource, temporal-stability, and proportionality invariants. Admitted actions are bound to signed receipts and compiled into pre-installed eBPF map updates. A Raspberry Pi 5 prototype on a university 5G test network admitted, rejected, and bounded intents at microsecond cost.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoResearch1

1Password's AI patching benchmark is misleading

Trail of Bits reanalysis says 1Password's 26% AI clean-fix rate is misleading; 86% of eligible patches blocked exploits.

Trail of Bits critiques 1Password's FLAWED AI patching benchmark, arguing its 26% clean-fix headline mixes trials where agents were instructed to apply wrong fixes (22% of data) with trials that prohibited compiling or testing (36%). Restricting to reasonable conditions, 2,634 of 3,067 patches (86%) blocked the supplied exploit. Trail of Bits also reports 12.5% of 2,265 developer first fixes failed in its own 2024-2026 assessments, and released post-patch-validation and review-walkthrough agent skills.

Lobsters · security · 2d agoResearch1

DDRop Attack Forces Intel TDX Confidential VMs Into Debug Mode and Exposes Memory

KU Leuven and ETH Zurich researchers released DDRop PoC hardware that forces Intel TDX confidential VMs into debug mode and exposes plaintext memory.

Researchers from KU Leuven, ETH Zurich, Google, and Durham University published proof-of-concept code, hardware designs, and firmware for DDRop, a DDR5 interposer that injects parity errors to drop selected cache-line writebacks. Because Intel TDX, Intel Scalable SGX, and AMD SEV-SNP lack per-line cryptographic freshness, processors decrypt and accept stale DRAM contents as current state. The PoC flips a victim's ATTRIBUTES.DEBUG flag to enable TDX debug mode, then copies victim memory in plaintext and can forge attestation reports. Affected environments include Intel 5th- and 6th-generation Xeon Scalable with TDX; Intel says the attack falls outside its cloud-computing threat model.

GBHackers · 3d agoResearch

New DDRop Attack Breaks Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP Confidential Computing

DDRop uses a sub-$200 DDR5 interposer to drop memory writes, breaking Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP confidentiality guarantees.

Researchers at KU Leuven, ETH Zurich, Durham University, and Google will present DDRop at ACM CCS 2026, a first active interposer attack on DDR5 that silently drops memory writes so processors keep reading stale encrypted data, exploiting the missing freshness guarantee in Intel TDX, Intel Scalable SGX, and AMD SEV-SNP. On Intel TDX's default logical integrity mode it enabled reading victim VM memory, toggling debug mode, and forging remote attestation; AMD SEV-SNP was limited to copying pages between VMs. TDX's stronger cryptographic integrity blocks cross-VM attacks but likely not attestation forgery. The team will release board designs, firmware, and attack code on GitHub; no evidence of real-world use exists and no simple patch is available.

The Hacker Newsupdated · 3d agofirst · 3d agoResearch 2 sources

When the Whole Company Adopts AI: What It Does to Your SOC

Analysis of 16.9 million SOC alerts finds AI-related alerts at 0.43%, growing 685% since February, with 94.1% noise and 0.02% real attacks.

A review of roughly 16.9 million SOC alerts found about 73,000 (0.43%) were AI-related, a share that grew 685% between February and June 2026. Of AI-related alerts, 94.1% were noise, 5.8% genuine risks, and 0.02% real attacks; 79.8% received benign verdicts, 81.7% were automatically suppressed, and only 5.4% reached a human analyst. The only confirmed attacks were phishing campaigns that weaponized AI brand names as lures, while developer coding agents spawning shells and reading credential stores routinely tripped detections written before AI agents existed.

The Hacker News · 6d agoResearch2