Search: “broadcast encryption”

Large Universe Subset Predicate Encryption with IND-CCA Security (with Constant-size Ciphertext and Keys)

New construction achieves first large-universe subset predicate encryption with IND-CCA security and constant-size ciphertexts and keys under subgroup decision assumptions.

The paper proposes the first large-universe subset predicate encryption scheme achieving IND-CCA security with both constant-size ciphertexts and constant-size secret keys. Prior large-universe constructions by Chatterjee and Mukherjee either achieved only restricted selective security with constant sizes or adaptive security with attribute-dependent ciphertext size, and none achieved CCA security. The new construction is proven selectively secure under standard subgroup decision problems. Black-box transformations yield the first CCA-secure WIBE and WKD-IBE with constant-size ciphertexts and keys.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 14, 10:02 UTC · 1d agoResearch

New Cryptographic Context Injection Attack Could Let Web Pages Steal Grok Chat Data

Adversa AI demonstrated 'Cryptographic Context Injection' making xAI's Grok leak chat history and session data to attacker-controlled servers via encrypted web payloads.

Adversa AI disclosed a technique where a web page carries an encrypted JSON object (PBKDF2 and AES-256-GCM) that Grok's code-execution runtime decrypts, letting attacker instructions bypass content classifiers and reach the model's context. The decrypted instructions direct Grok to embed the user's name, approximate location, subscription tier and ongoing conversation into a URL it fetches, exfiltrating the data without confirmation. Testing targeted grok.com running Grok 4.5 Fast on August 19, 2026, with a reported 40% success rate over 20 attempts since June; no CVE, patch, or in-the-wild exploitation is reported. A related demonstration reproduced Gemini 3 Flash system instructions via a fabricated Python traceback, while GPT-5 failed to parse the payload and Claude Sonnet 4.5 flagged it as prompt injection.

The Hacker News·Aug 20, 15:14 UTC · 26d agoAI safety & security

CVE-2026-34486: Apache Tomcat EncryptInterceptor Fail-Open Bypass

Technical analysis shows CVE-2026-34486 is a one-line fail-open regression in Tomcat Tribes enabling unauthenticated RCE via Java deserialization.

CVE-2026-34486 is a fail-open regression in Tomcat's Tribes EncryptInterceptor, introduced while fixing the CVE-2026-29146 padding-oracle flaw; Apache rated it Important and NVD scores it 7.5 High. Decryption failures are now forwarded to an unfiltered ObjectInputStream, and public PoC repositories demonstrate unauthenticated RCE on default port 4000 when clustering, the EncryptInterceptor, a reachable receiver and deserialization gadgets are all present. Affected releases 9.0.116, 10.1.53 and 11.0.20 are fixed in 9.0.117, 10.1.54 and 11.0.21; Tomcat 8.5 is unaffected.

Web discovery (articles for new exploits & KEV entries)·Sep 8, 20:09 UTC · 7d agoExploit / PoCCVE-2026-34486CVE-2026-291461

gr-PHYSEC: Real-time Channel-based Key Generation for Physical Layer Secure Wireless Communications

gr-PHYSEC GNU Radio module derives symmetric encryption keys from wireless channel randomness using a neural network, validated on robotic platforms with ADALM-Pluto SDRs.

The paper introduces gr-PHYSEC, a GNU Radio out-of-tree module for real-time physical-layer key generation that derives symmetric keys from the wireless channel's inherent randomness instead of pre-shared secrets. A trained neural network extracts channel features between trusted parties during probe exchanges; features are quantized into binary keys, reconciled via Reed-Solomon encoding, and secured with SHA-512 hashing before direct use for encryption. Real-world experiments at the FAU CAAI connected robotics testbed using ADALM Pluto software-defined radios and NVIDIA Jetson Orin demonstrated low key disagreement rates and NIST-verified randomness. Source code is publicly available on GitHub.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 14, 21:37 UTC · 1d agoResearch

Brazil orders Discord to suspend livestreaming after teen suicide

Brazil's data protection authority orders Discord to disable its Go Live livestreaming feature nationwide until child-safety safeguards are demonstrated.

Brazil's National Data Protection Authority (ANPD) found robust evidence that Discord failed to protect children from harmful content and ordered the Go Live feature suspended until effective safeguards are shown, following the July death of a 13-year-old girl during a roughly 45-minute livestream; five teenagers were arrested. Discord has three business days to implement the suspension and could face fines of up to 50 million reais (about $10 million) per violation. Regulators criticized the March addition of end-to-end encryption to Go Live for limiting real-time content detection, and are also investigating Discord's age-verification and content-removal practices, while a parallel probe tied neo-Nazi recruitment communities to Telegram.

The Record·Aug 13, 13:48 UTC · Aug 13, 2026Policy & legal

ROSETTA: Efficient and Accurate Privacy-Preserving LLM Decoding via Hybrid CKKS/TFHE Evaluation

ROSETTA is a hybrid CKKS/TFHE homomorphic encryption framework for privacy-preserving LLM decoding, achieving up to 4.8x Softmax and 2.1x end-to-end speedups.

The paper proposes ROSETTA, a hybrid CKKS/TFHE fully homomorphic encryption framework for private inference on generative LLMs, targeting the nonlinear operations that dominate autoregressive decoding cost. It introduces an adaptive segmented lookup-table protocol based on TFHE and a scheme-aware operator-selection framework that assigns each nonlinear operator to CKKS or TFHE to minimize latency. Experiments show up to 4.8x Softmax speedup and 1.5-2.1x end-to-end decoding speedup over the state-of-the-art CacheMir framework.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 15, 09:51 UTC · 23h agoResearch

North Korea-linked IT Workers Are Getting Hired Inside Western Companies

Huntress documented five DPRK-linked FAMOUS CHOLLIMA workers hired by Western companies in 2026 using fake identities, proxies and laptop farms.

Huntress published an investigation of five confirmed 2026 cases of North Korea-linked IT workers, tracked as FAMOUS CHOLLIMA, obtaining remote jobs at legitimate companies in IT, sales, marketing and healthcare. The workers use stolen or fabricated identity documents, VPNs and proxy services, and some were caught using PiKVM hardware-level control, travel routers and laptop farms to mask their true location. Detection relied on document forensics, behavioral anomalies and indicators like identical typo artifacts in electricity bills rather than network intrusions.

Security Affairs·Sep 1, 11:08 UTC · 14d agoThreat actor in the wild

Closing the Loop: Bidirectional Fully Encrypted Protocols

Researchers show naively composing unidirectional fully encrypted protocols is detectable and construct provably secure bidirectional FEPs, validated in Rust.

The paper introduces formal security definitions for bidirectional fully encrypted protocols (BiFEPs), covering exact shaping, delivery, protocol-state integrity, private half-close, and cross-direction isolation. It shows trivially composing two unidirectional FEPs enables detection attacks via cross-direction dependencies like traffic imbalance and connection tear-down. The authors construct provably secure BiFEPs for datastream and datagram settings, validated with a Rust implementation; no surveyed deployed protocol provides the full set of properties.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 15, 16:32 UTC · 16h agoResearch

Microsoft’s September 2026 Patch Tuesday addresses 964 CVEs (CVE-2026-81963, CVE-2026-85880)

Microsoft's September 2026 Patch Tuesday fixes a record 964 CVEs, including two zero-days actively exploited in the wild.

Microsoft patched a record 964 CVEs in its September 2026 Patch Tuesday release, with 101 rated critical and 824 rated important, making it the largest Patch Tuesday to date. The release includes fixes for two zero-days that were exploited in the wild, with CVE-2026-81963 and CVE-2026-85880 highlighted in the release. Affected products span Windows core components, Office, Exchange, .NET, Visual Studio, Active Directory services (including AD CS and AD FS) and numerous Azure services. Tenable notes the release surpasses July's as the biggest ever.

Tenable Blog·Sep 8, 18:07 UTC · 7d agoVulnerability in the wildCVE-2026-81963CVE-2026-858801

Memory-Efficient Designs for Word-Wise Universal Fully Homomorphic Encryption

BXT framework mitigates FHE memory bottlenecks via ciphertext compression, serialization, delayed seeding, and digit pruning, achieving up to 3.8x CNN inference speedup.

A new paper proposes BXT, an optimization framework for word-wise Universal Fully Homomorphic Encryption that targets the memory bottleneck rather than compute. It combines four techniques: ciphertext compression via seed regeneration, bit-packed ciphertext serialization for L2-to-L1 transfers, delayed PRNG-heavy offline seed generation across aggregated operations, and fault-aware ciphertext digit pruning. On CNN inference, the BXT-CSO50 configuration achieves up to 3.8x speedup over a 100x GPU baseline with under 1% accuracy loss at 50% comparison precision.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 4, 06:03 UTC · 12d agoResearch

ThreatsDay: Odysseus RCE, Samsung One-Click Takeover, iCloud Backdoor Fight + 27 More Stories

The Hacker News·Aug 6, 15:24 UTC · Aug 6, 2026VulnerabilityCVE-2025-21079CVE-2025-584861

Meta expands subscription push with new AI-focused plans

Meta launched Meta One subscriptions ($7.99–$499/month) bundling expanded Muse AI image and video generation across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Meta introduced Meta One with consumer Core ($7.99/mo) and Premium ($19.99/mo) tiers plus business plans ranging from Essential ($14.99/mo) to Max ($499/mo). Subscriptions unlock expanded Muse Image, Muse Video, Restyle editing, and Meta Business Agent usage, following Meta's $14.3B investment in Scale AI. Appfigures data shows Instagram's daily subscription revenue averaging $1.2M and Facebook's $528K after the March Plus-tier launches, up 475% and 143% respectively. BNP Paribas forecasts $13.5B added revenue by 2028; Truist estimates $20B by 2030.

TechCrunch · AI·Sep 15, 17:05 UTC · 15h agoAI industry

Grok exfiltrates user data when malicious instructions are encrypted

Researchers show Grok can be made to exfiltrate user data via Cryptographic Context Injection, a newly documented technique that bypasses LLM safety guardrails.

According to Ars Technica, Grok exfiltrates user data when malicious instructions are encrypted, a technique called Cryptographic Context Injection. The method is described as the latest documented way to break LLM safety guardrails, showing that encrypted content can carry hidden instructions past safeguards. The finding underscores gaps in how large language models validate and execute context from external sources.

Ars Technica · Security·Aug 20, 13:00 UTC · 26d agoAI safety & security1

DOUBLECUP Uses ClickFix and Cached PNGs to Deliver CountLoader and DeviceManager RAT

The Hacker News·Aug 4, 09:03 UTC · Aug 4, 2026Malware

Cisco Secure Email Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions Ciphertext Decryption Vulnerabilities

Cisco released an advisory for S/MIME ciphertext decryption flaws in Secure Email that could let unauthenticated remote attackers recover plaintext via machine-in-the-middle.

Multiple vulnerabilities in the S/MIME decryption functionality of Cisco Secure Email stem from insufficient validation of message integrity. An unauthenticated remote attacker could intercept and modify traffic between email gateways using a machine-in-the-middle technique to obtain plaintext from encrypted messages. No workarounds are available; no CVE identifiers or exploitation status were included in the advisory text.

Cisco Security Advisories·Sep 8, 11:22 UTC · 7d agoAdvisory

Risky Bulletin: Slovakia finds Russian backdoor in traffic speed cameras

Slovakia's NBU found an SMS-triggered backdoor in Russian-made NERO R-ONE traffic cameras, pausing a 279-unit deployment.

Slovakia's national security service NBU issued an alert against NERO R-ONE high-speed traffic cameras after finding a backdoor that grants shell and network access via SMS from hardcoded Russian phone numbers. The cameras are a rebranded version of the Russian CORDON PRO.M model by St. Petersburg firm Semicon, purchased via a Cyprus shell company under a €30 million EU-funded project. The report also found SecureBoot disabled, vulnerable web management, and unauthenticated live streams; the Interior Ministry paused deployment of 279 cameras pending independent assessment.

Risky Business News·Aug 19, 04:52 UTC · 28d agoThreat actor in the wild1

Why Johnny Can't Encrypt: A Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0 (1999)

Seminal 1999 USENIX study finds most novice users cannot correctly sign and encrypt email with PGP 5.0 in 90 minutes.

Whitten and Tygar's USENIX Security Symposium paper evaluates whether cryptography novices can use PGP 5.0 effectively, using cognitive walkthrough analysis and a laboratory user test. The majority of test participants failed to successfully sign and encrypt a message within 90 minutes, despite PGP 5.0 having a well-regarded graphical interface. The authors argue that security requires usability standards beyond those of general consumer software and propose domain-specific UI design principles for security. The paper is a foundational reference in usable security research.

Lobsters · security·Sep 9, 06:47 UTC · 7d agoResearch

Risky Bulletin: Expired cards can be used for new transactions

Researchers show expired Visa contactless cards can be revived via NFC man-in-the-middle relay to run fraudulent transactions; roundup also covers major breaches.

University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers built an NFC man-in-the-middle rig that updates a card's expiration date in transit and relays the modified payment to POS terminals, reviving expired contactless cards; Visa terminals and the backends of all five banks studied failed to catch the manipulation. The same roundup reports Iranian hackers shut down a small UK power plant for four days, Lazarus breached South Korea's Presidential Office as part of a campaign exceeding 100 victims, and French telecom SFR suffered a breach affecting over 2.1 million customers.

Risky Business News·Aug 24, 04:40 UTC · 23d agoResearch1

Post-quantum cryptography adoption and the national security implications

Opinion analysis argues quantum computing favors nation-state espionage, leaving lagging post-quantum adoption at critical infrastructure exposed to harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks.

A CSO Online opinion piece argues that the extreme cost and infrastructure requirements of quantum computers will concentrate cryptographically relevant quantum capability among nation-states and a few corporations, favoring espionage and economic espionage over criminal monetization. It highlights harvest-now-decrypt-later risk to long-lived secrets, expert warnings such as Filippo Valsorda's, and diverging CRQC timelines with Google suggesting possibly 2029. The piece predicts governments, banks, and targeted sectors will adopt PQC first while utilities, small hospitals, and local government lag, widening exploitable gaps in critical infrastructure reminiscent of Salt Typhoon-style access.

CSO Online·Sep 9, 09:00 UTC · 7d agoIndustry

Srsly Risky Biz: Data Theft Extortion Is Booming! Hooray!

Google's Threat Intelligence Group reports data theft extortion is surging, with Silent Ransom extracting $10M and $18M from two law firms and BlackFile taking $10M.

Risky Business News, citing Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG), reports that cybercriminals are shifting from encrypting ransomware to data theft extortion. Law firms Goodwin Procter and WilmerHale paid Silent Ransom (Luna Moth) ransoms of $10 million and $18 million respectively; GTIG says the group often completes contact-to-extortion in a single day, now sometimes compromising systems in person posing as IT staff. BlackFile, now calling itself Redact, used high-volume vishing to steal credentials and pivot through OneDrive, SharePoint and other SaaS apps, collecting more than $10 million between February and mid-May with an average ransom of $750,000, including attempted attacks on Wall Street hedge funds and private equity firms. The piece argues governments should keep pressure on encrypting ransomware gangs while lower-impact extortion absorbs criminal energy.

Risky Business News·Aug 13, 09:46 UTC · Aug 13, 2026Threat actor1

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.

Hacker News · security·Sep 7, 02:14 UTC · 9d agoResearchHN 52↑ · 3 comments

Threats Making WAVs - Incident Response to a Cryptomining Attack

Guardicore researchers dissect a cryptomining attack that hid a cryptominer inside WAV files, mapping the full infection chain and response steps.

Guardicore security researchers present a full analysis of a cryptomining attack that concealed a cryptominer inside WAV audio files. The report documents the complete attack chain from detection through infection, network propagation, and malware analysis. It also includes recommendations for optimizing incident response processes in data centers.

Akamai Blog·Sep 8, 15:13 UTC · 7d agoMalware in the wild

Operation ASTERIX: Anatomy of a Crypto Fraud Pipeline

Rapid7 exposed infrastructure behind a cryptocurrency fraud pipeline using phishing panels, voice-dialing scripts, fake wallets, and AI coding assistants.

Rapid7 researchers identified an exposed web directory on infrastructure used to support a cryptocurrency fraud operation tracked as Operation ASTERIX. The server contained raw phone-number datasets, account-validation tools, enriched lead records, phishing panels, voice-dialing scripts, fake wallet applications, persistence mechanisms, and Telegram exfiltration code. Recovered prompts, shell history, and project files show the operator relied on AI coding assistants to package Electron applications, obfuscate code, troubleshoot builds, and modify phishing infrastructure.

Rapid7 Blog·Aug 17, 11:29 UTC · 29d agoPhishing & fraud

Python Now Has a Post-Quantum Encryption Library

Schneier on Security·Aug 10, 11:02 UTC · Aug 10, 2026Industry1

Rare Not Random Using Token Efficiency for Secrets Scanning

Researcher proposes token efficiency (string length divided by BPE token count) as a better post-regex filter than entropy for secrets scanning, validated on CredData.

The post explores whether Byte-Pair Encoding tokenization can replace Shannon entropy as the primary filter for candidate secrets captured by regex in tools like Gitleaks. It defines 'token efficiency' as string length divided by token count under the cl100k_base tokenizer; secret-like strings such as GitHub tokens tokenize into many small tokens and score low, while natural text scores high. Evaluating labeled secrets from the CredData dataset shows a usable separation, with roughly 2.5 suggested as a minimum cutoff versus Gitleaks' 3.5 entropy threshold. The technique is positioned as a post-regex filtering step rather than a standalone detector.

Lobsters · security·Sep 12, 06:42 UTC · 4d agoResearch

Scaling Verification of Cryptographic Software with Aeneas, Rust, and Lean

Microsoft SymCrypt implementations of SHA-3 and ML-KEM verified in Lean via Aeneas-extracted Rust models, with AI agents writing proofs.

The paper develops a methodology for verifying production Rust cryptographic code by using Aeneas to extract pure models into Lean, avoiding low-level pointer and aliasing reasoning. Applied to Microsoft's SymCrypt, it verifies SHA-3 and ML-KEM implementations ported from C to Rust and extends SymCrypt with FrodoKEM, ML-DSA, and HPKE. A 237 KLOC Lean development establishes safety, panic-freedom, and functional correctness of 16.7 KLOC of Rust supporting post-quantum cipher suites on x86-64 and ARM. AI agents autonomously write formal proofs verified by the Lean kernel, and evaluation shows verified Rust meets SymCrypt's performance and portability requirements.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 14, 14:32 UTC · 1d agoResearch1

Hacked Voice Remote Becomes

Hackers compromised a voice-controlled remote control and repurposed it, highlighting security gaps in connected consumer devices.

Infosecurity Magazine's headline indicates a voice-controlled remote was hacked and turned to another purpose. The full article text was unavailable, so technical details, victim, and actor remain unconfirmed. The item underscores risks around consumer IoT and smart-home peripherals.

Infosecurity Magazine·Aug 19, 00:00 UTC · 28d agoThreat actor in the wild

OptiPrime: Optimizing Private Inference through Protocol-Hardware Co-design

OptiPrime co-designs HE-MPC protocols with hardware acceleration to remove network communication bottlenecks in private DNN inference, beating Cheetah by up to 5.7x.

OptiPrime is a protocol-hardware co-optimization framework for private deep neural network inference based on hybrid homomorphic encryption (HE) and multi-party computation (MPC). It introduces a novel HE protocol for convolutions that reduces the number of transmitted output ciphertexts, addressing the network bottleneck that limits gains from commercial HE accelerators. A lightweight compression system reduces weight plaintext memory traffic by 10x, while a specialized dataflow maximizes on-chip reuse of intermediate ciphertexts. Experiments show up to 5.7x speedup over the Cheetah baseline on CPUs and 4.2x with an accelerator.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 15, 09:29 UTC · 23h agoResearch

CertiFlash: A Formal Verification Framework for Flash Translation Layers in Computational Solid State Drives

CertiFlash provides machine-checked formal verification of SSD flash translation layers, proving isolation, integrity, and ownership invariants to prevent tenant data leaks.

CertiFlash is an open-source formal verification framework for Flash Translation Layers (FTL) in computational SSDs, mechanized in the Rocq proof assistant. It shows that a faulty FTL can corrupt device state at five surfaces (e.g., leaking data between tenants or dropping integrity tags), demonstrated on a DaisyPlus OpenSSD. Designers prove once that every operation of a general FTL model preserves a global invariant covering mapping, isolation, integrity, ownership, and allocation; new designs need only discharge five hypotheses. Across four case studies, added effort was 27-3,231 lines against a 16,489-line framework.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 9, 15:44 UTC · 6d agoResearch1

[remote] ipTIME A3004T - Remote Code Execution

A remote code execution exploit was published for ipTIME A3004T routers, a flaw relevant to internet-facing devices.

Exploit-DB published exploit #52644 for the ipTIME A3004T router, demonstrating remote code execution. Router RCE flaws are typically exploitable by unauthenticated attackers on exposed devices. The disclosure text does not report exploitation in the wild.

Exploit-DB·Aug 17, 00:00 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Exploit / PoC

Cyberattack encrypts systems at Bavarian municipal utility

Hackers encrypted the central IT network of Bavarian utility Stadtwerke Landsberg, disrupting office systems but not electricity or water services.

Stadtwerke Landsberg said hackers encrypted its central IT network overnight on Sept. 1, prompting disconnection from the internet, crisis-team activation and external forensic support. Essential electricity and water services were unaffected, but staff availability was limited and customer data such as names, addresses and bank details may have been accessed. No ransomware group was named and no extortion demand was confirmed. The attack follows a similar late-June encryption incident at a North Rhine-Westphalia municipal utility, and the BSI consistently ranks ransomware among Germany's most serious cyber threats.

The Record·Sep 8, 12:00 UTC · 7d agoRansomware in the wild

SCHERI: Provably Secure Speculation Under the Constant-Time Policy for CHERI (Extended Version)

Researchers formally prove existing CHERI speculation proposals leak secrets and present SCHERI, a processor design with end-to-end Spectre-resistant constant-time guarantees.

The paper builds a formal framework reasoning jointly about capability safety, speculative execution, and information-flow security on CHERI architectures. It demonstrates that existing secure-speculation proposals fail to preserve constant-time confidentiality guarantees and can transiently leak isolated secrets. The authors present SCHERI, a new processor design formally proven to provide end-to-end secure speculation for the constant-time policy, resilient to Spectre attacks.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 15, 16:33 UTC · 16h agoResearch

Breaking the Seal: Static Deobfuscation of JSCeal’s Compiled V8 Bytecode

Check Point's hasherezade details static deobfuscation of JSCeal, a V8-bytecode stealer targeting cryptocurrency applications since March 2024.

JSCeal is an infostealer distributed as compiled V8 bytecode (.jsc) executed by a bundled Node.js runtime, aimed at cryptocurrency applications. Other vendors track the same family under the names WEEVILPROXY or MeadowLocust. Check Point Research has tracked the campaign since early 2024, with activity dating back to March 2024. The write-up presents a static approach to unpacking the bytecode without executing it.

Check Point Research·Aug 31, 13:38 UTC · 15d agoMalware in the wild1