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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 · 7d agoResearch

Understanding the Usability of Cryptographic Verification Tools

Survey of Tamarin and ProVerif users reveals usability barriers: debugging non-termination, model validation, and opaque proof failures hinder cryptographic protocol verification.

The paper presents an exploratory human-centered survey of researchers, graduate students, and practitioners with hands-on experience using Tamarin, ProVerif, and related cryptographic protocol verification tools. Findings reveal usability barriers across the verification workflow, including difficulties debugging non-termination and performance issues plus the lack of systematic methods for validating formal models against real protocols. When proofs fail without concrete attacks, users commonly simplify models, add helper lemmas, and revisit modeling abstractions. Participants called for actionable diagnostics, clearer explanations of results, visualization, and automation for recurring proof tasks.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

How CHERIoT Provides Strong and Usable Isolation Without an MMU

ACM Queue paper explains how CHERIoT uses CHERI hardware capabilities to give microcontroller-class IoT devices memory and privilege isolation without an MMU.

The ACM Queue article (DOI 10.1145/3831361) describes CHERIoT, a RISC-V-derived platform that scales CHERI capability-based hardware down to small embedded and IoT microcontrollers. It provides strong, fine-grained isolation and memory safety without a memory management unit, aiming to make compartmentalization practical for low-cost devices. The piece emphasizes usability of the isolation model alongside its security guarantees.

Lobsters · security · 5d agoResearch

12 Best Endpoint Privilege Management (EPM) Tools Compared (2026): Features & Pricing

A 2026 buyer's guide compares 12 endpoint privilege management tools, ranking CyberArk and BeyondTrust as enterprise leaders.

An editorial comparison evaluates 12 endpoint privilege management (EPM) tools on elevation control, manageability, and pricing model. The guide argues that standing local-admin rights fuel ransomware and lateral movement, making their removal a high-impact control that cyber insurers increasingly mandate. CyberArk and BeyondTrust are positioned as enterprise-depth leaders, with Delinea, Heimdal, and ManageEngine for the mid-market, and Admin By Request and CyberFOX AutoElevate for SMBs and MSPs. Pricing is generally per endpoint or per user, and the article is explicitly an assessment rather than a product release or incident report.

GBHackersupdated · 3h agofirst · 5d agoIndustry 13 sources

CISA's logging guidance works beyond government

CISA released its Logging Reference Architecture in August 2026 to help federal agencies meet OMB M-26-14 logging requirements, usable as a benchmark by critical infrastructure operators.

CISA's Logging Reference Architecture (LRA), released in August 2026, helps US federal civilian agencies satisfy logging requirements in OMB Memorandum M-26-14 and explicitly encourages critical infrastructure operators to use it as a benchmark. The framework is organized around continuous event monitoring and threat hunting, investigation, response, and forensics, with a federal baseline of six months searchable and one year retrievable logs. Agencies must submit Agency Logging Plans within 90 days and work toward Advanced maturity within 320 days; the guidance also treats AI outputs as derived data requiring human review and preserved metadata.

Help Net Security · 23d agoAdvisory

Microsoft Confirms KB5002914 Update Breaks Copy and Paste on Excel

Microsoft confirms KB5002914 Excel security update silently breaks copy-paste in Excel 2016-2024, forcing admins to choose between usability and security fixes.

Microsoft added a known issue to KB5002914, the September 8, 2026 Excel security update, where paste, autofill, and formula dragging fail silently with no error in Excel 2016, 2019, 2021, and 2024. The update addresses remote code execution and information disclosure flaws including CVE-2026-81399, CVE-2026-81390, and CVE-2026-81954. No hotfix date has been published as of September 15, 2026; the only widely confirmed recovery is uninstalling or rolling back KB5002914, which drops the month's Excel security fixes.

The Self-Expanding Stolen Inference Supply Chain: An AI Agent Harvesting and Re-Serving LLM Access, (Fri, Sep 11th)

An autonomous coding agent harvested LLM API access from poorly secured gateways and aggregated stolen inference capacity behind a self-hosted gateway

A SANS researcher observed a semi-autonomous coding agent finding weakly secured LLM resale gateways via FOFA queries, creating trial accounts with temporary emails and CAPTCHA solving, and exploiting weak authorization such as client-supplied group_id fields. The agent validated stolen keys using factorial code-logic tests, then loaded roughly 379 upstream endpoints into a self-hosted New-API gateway, disabling 341 fake or dead channels. Five model names including claude-opus-5 and gpt-5.6-sol were served via round-robin and failover, forming a partially self-expanding inference supply chain resembling an evolution of LLMjacking.

SANS Internet Storm Center · 4d agoThreat actor in the wild