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Automatic Key Exchange: faster, post-quantum secure origin handshakes for 45 billion daily connections (and counting)

Cloudflare's Automatic Key Exchange probes origins to lead with preferred key exchange, cutting HelloRetryRequests from 52% to 3.7% and enabling automatic post-quantum origin connections.

Cloudflare announced Automatic Key Exchange, an extension of Automatic SSL/TLS that probes each origin's supported key agreement algorithms and leads with the preferred one, favoring the post-quantum hybrid X25519MLKEM768. Rollover across roughly 45 billion daily origin connections cut HelloRetryRequests from about 52% to 3.7%, saving more than 150 ms of p90 handshake latency. Hundreds of thousands of domains now receive post-quantum origin connections without manual configuration, supporting Cloudflare's goal of quantum-safe encryption by 2029 to counter harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks.

Cloudflare Blog · 8d agoResearch

Session Attestation for Unmodified TLS Services in Confidential Virtual Machines

SessionLatch adds session attestation to unmodified TLS services in confidential VMs, cutting short-upload latency 63.1% versus TNG on Hygon CSV.

SessionLatch provides session attestation for confidential virtual machines without modifying applications, TLS implementations, or certificates. It relies on trusted observation of the server's locally generated ephemeral public key combined with standard TLS key confirmation, moving attestation integration to the operating system via a temporary latch that overlaps evidence exchange with the TLS handshake. Implemented with Linux and Windows integrations and evaluated on real Hygon CSV attestation, it reduces short-upload mean latency by 63.1%/23.0% relative to TNG in interleaved Linux/Windows experiments, while preserving enterprise service authentication and the native TLS data path, and supports mutual attestation.

arXiv cs.CR · 8d agoResearch

Signing TLS handshakes inside a TPM

Blog post demonstrates signing TLS handshakes in Go with a TPM-held private key; full text was unavailable behind an Anubis challenge.

The title indicates a technique write-up on using a TPM-protected private key to sign TLS handshakes from Go. The full article text was not retrievable because the site serves an Anubis Hashcash-style proof-of-work challenge to automated fetchers, so no additional technical details (code, library, or threat model) could be extracted at collection time.

Lobsters · security · 9d agoResearch

When Agents Look Like Beacons: NIDS Evasion by Model Context Protocol Trafficnew

Research shows Model Context Protocol agent traffic structurally resembles C2 beaconing and evades Suricata signatures and RITA behavioral scoring in testbeds.

An arXiv study demonstrates that Model Context Protocol (MCP) JSON-RPC traffic over Streamable HTTP mimics the polling patterns of C2 frameworks like Cobalt Strike and is not flagged as anomalous by standard enterprise defenses. In a Docker testbed with eleven traffic profiles across three TLS conditions, Suricata with the Emerging Threats Open ruleset produced near-zero alerts and RITA assigned a consistent 0.0 beacon score, regardless of jitter or TLS inspection. The authors propose an agent-native network indication standard using Agent-Native ALPN and out-of-band headers.

arXiv cs.CR · 11h agoResearch

MacOS 27 - First Boot, (Tue, Sep 15th)

SANS ISC documents the expected network traffic macOS 27 'Golden Gate' generates on first boot to help defenders baseline their networks.

Johannes Ullrich of SANS Internet Storm Center captured roughly 300 packets from a macOS 27 'Golden Gate' system before user login, covering DHCP, IPv6 duplicate address discovery, DNS, and TCP behavior. macOS 27 resolves hostnames like albert.apple.com (device activation, certificate-pinned), push messaging hosts, and ipv4only.arpa for NAT64 networks. The OS still uses a TCP window scale of 6, ECN, and random timestamps, with only four TCP connections observed during boot. The analysis provides a reference baseline for security teams monitoring Apple endpoints.

SANS Internet Storm Center · 1d agoResearch

Post-quantum migration gets harder when every user holds a key

Quantus CEO Christopher Smith discusses post-quantum migration pitfalls, including oversized keys breaking IPsec, SSH and TLS, and hard-to-migrate blockchain user keys.

Quantus CEO Christopher Smith describes post-quantum migration findings from banks and hospitals, including forgotten default passwords, orphaned admin keys held by former employees and hidden password hashes on user devices. Larger post-quantum keys and signatures break size assumptions in IPsec, SSH, TLS and libp2p, while migrating blockchain user keys remains hard because every user must act. He argues boards should fund quantum migration like insurance by quantifying cryptographic failure risk, and warns a silent quantum break would be difficult to detect from outside.

Help Net Security · Aug 12, 2026Research

I've factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority from the 90s

Security researcher factored two 512-bit RSA root CA keys from defunct 1990s certificate authority E-Certify using CADO-NFS on a desktop in roughly 30 hours each.

A researcher extracted legacy root certificates from archived Netscape and Internet Explorer installers, identifying two 512-bit RSA roots shipped with Netscape 4.51 in 1999 by the defunct Canadian CA E-Certify. Using CADO-NFS on a Ryzen 9 5950X desktop, the keys were factored in 32 and 29 hours respectively, allowing private key reconstruction. The work comes shortly after RSA-260 (862-bit) was factored, the largest known factorization to date. The researcher also built a legacy TLS server and published keys and tools on GitHub.

Hacking Public Wi-Fi DNS to Steal Credentials

Attackers can hijack public Wi-Fi DNS to redirect users to credential-stealing fake login pages; commenters debate HTTPS limits and mitigations like encrypted DNS.

The discussion examines how an attacker controlling DNS on shared or public Wi-Fi networks can redirect requests for legitimate services to attacker-controlled servers to steal credentials. Commenters analyze whether HTTPS and certificates mitigate the attack, noting attackers often rely on HTTP or browser trust quirks. Suggested defenses include encrypted DNS (DoH), DNSSEC, and travel routers running OpenWRT. No specific campaign, victims, or indicators are provided.

Schneier on Security · Aug 17, 2026Research1

Getting ahead of ‘harvest-now-decrypt-later’: Post-quantum cryptography planning

Opinion piece urges organizations to begin post-quantum cryptography migration now, citing harvest-now-decrypt-later risk and NIST deadlines.

CSO Online outlines why harvest-now-decrypt-later makes long-lived sensitive data a current risk even before quantum computers exist. It cites NIST IR 8547 timelines deprecating RSA-2048 and ECC P-256 by 2030 and removing them by 2035, finalized FIPS standards ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and SLH-DSA, upcoming FN-DSA (FIPS 206), NSA requirements for national security systems from 2027, and UK NCSC phased guidance through 2035. The author recommends cryptographic discovery, crypto-agility, and prioritizing long-confidentiality data and TLS endpoints.

CSO Online · 6d agoResearch

Accountability in Certificate Transparency and Variants

Formal Dolev-Yao analysis shows plain Certificate Transparency requires an honest log, SCT Auditing removes that assumption, and Gossiping does not.

The paper analyzes accountability in Certificate Transparency and its SCT Auditing and Gossiping extensions in the Dolev-Yao model, starting from a vanilla PKI. It finds plain CT provides accountability only under the assumption of an honest log. The SCT Auditing extension can eliminate that assumption, while the Gossiping extension cannot. CT is supported by all major browsers and obliges Certificate Authorities to record issued certificates in public, monitored logs.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch

Package Manager Trends

Sixteen-week roundup finds package managers converging on release-age cooldowns, install-script blocking, malware scans, and recurring path-traversal and credential-leak fixes.

The author aggregates supply-chain security trends from sixteen weeks of This Week in Package Management, built from about 80 RSS feeds. Release-age cooldown gates shipped in Deno 2.8, Bundler, npm, Yarn, mise, Hex, Mamba, and Cargo, with Dependabot making a three-day cooldown default in August. npm 12 and Bun 1.4 now block lifecycle install scripts by default, and Composer 2.10 and uv added install/publish-time malware checks, while npm's registry began scanning at publish time. Path traversal on archive extraction was fixed in 14 of 16 weeks across tools including uv, pnpm, Docker, and Composer, and credential-misdirection bugs affected Cargo, ORAS, Composer, and Renovate.

Lobsters · security · 6d agoResearch1

Has anybody seen my keys? A key-hierarchy strategy for rack-level security

Oxide's RFD 0301 proposes a rack-level key hierarchy using Shamir secret sharing and a trust quorum to protect data-at-rest keys.

Oxide's request for discussion (RFD 0301) lays out a key-hierarchy strategy for rack-level security, deriving keys from a rack secret protected by Shamir secret sharing across a trust quorum of sleds, with keys exchanged over authenticated sprockets sessions. The document maps which keys protect control-plane data, metrics, Crucible extents, and authentication tokens, and defines open questions on key lifecycle, locality, and compromise handling. Future work includes sealing shares with the root of trust so an attacker would need to steal K whole sleds to reconstruct the rack secret.

Chrome DevTools Technique Enables Authenticated Session Hijacking in Live Windows Browsers

SpecterOps released CDP-Enable-BOF, a Beacon Object File that enables Chrome DevTools Protocol in live Chrome or Edge processes on Windows for session hijacking.

SpecterOps released CDP-Enable-BOF, an x64 Beacon Object File that activates Chrome DevTools Protocol inside running chrome.exe or msedge.exe processes on Windows, exposing cookies, history, saved passwords, and authenticated sessions without administrator rights. It calls Chromium's StartRemoteDebuggingServer on the browser UI thread to stay reliable under CFG, TLS, and CET, and was tested on Chrome 147 and Edge 147. The technique builds on work by DeathFlamingo and Cedric Van Bockhaven; Google had hardened remote debugging in Chrome 136 after attackers used it to steal cookies post-App-Bound Encryption. Defenders can watch Sysmon Event IDs 8 and 10 for injection into browser processes.

The Hacker News · 22d agoResearch2

TLD Tracker: Exploring Newly Released Top

Unit 42 tracked 19 newly released top-level domains and found large-scale phishing, unwanted program distribution, and cybersquatting tied to TLD launch dates.

Researchers analyzed 19 new generic TLDs, including .zip, .bot, .ing, and .meme, released or approaching general availability over roughly 18 months. Data from passive DNS, registry zone files, newly registered domain feeds, and the Tranco top-1M list showed phishing campaigns, potentially unwanted program distribution, and domain squatting on these TLDs. Abuse correlated with each TLD's rollout phases, indicating attackers monitor general availability dates to register and weaponize domains. The IANA root database now lists over 1,000 generic TLDs.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Research

Automatically Detecting DNS Hijacking in Passive DNS

Unit 42's machine learning pipeline detected 6,729 DNS hijacking events between March and September 2024, hitting political parties, ISPs, and universities.

Unit 42 processes roughly 167 million new DNS records daily and applies a machine learning model using 74 features over 169 TB of passive DNS and geolocation data to flag hijacked domains. From March to September 2024 the pipeline screened over 29 billion records and classified 6,729 as DNS hijacking, averaging 38 detections per day; a new model detects hijacks in customer traffic within about 10 minutes. Notable cases include a Hungarian political party's hijacked domain, defacement of a large utility company and ISP, and university and research center domains repurposed for illicit gambling. DNS hijacking typically relies on stolen registrar or DNS provider credentials or cache poisoning, enabling MitM attacks, phishing, drive-by downloads, and scams.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Research in the wild