Yesterday Apple announced a big step towards deploying real AI in their Siri ecosystem. In most ways this is good and inevitable: Siri is one of the world’s most widely-used voice agents, and it would be good if it didn’t suck. The idea that Apple would boost its capabilities with frontier models wasn’t so much … Continue reading The future…
#apple
24 posts
9 Jun
1 Mar 2025
This is a cryptography blog and I always feel the need to apologize for any post that isn’t “straight cryptography.” I’m actually getting a little tired of apologizing for it (though if you want some hard-core cryptography content, there’s plenty here and here.) Sometimes I have to remind my colleagues that out in the real … Continue reading Dear Apple:…
23 Feb 2025
Two weeks ago, the Washington Post reported that the U.K. government had issued a secret order to Apple demanding that the company include a “backdoor” into the company’s end-to-end encrypted iCloud Backup feature. From the article: The British government’s undisclosed order, issued last month, requires blanket capability to view fully encrypted material, not merely assistance … Continue reading Three questions…
12 Feb 2025
I’m supposed to be finishing a wonky series on proof systems (here and here) and I promise I will do that this week. In the midst of this I’ve been a bit distracted by world events. Last week the Washington Post published a bombshell story announcing that the U.K. had filed “technical capability notices” demanding … Continue reading U.K. asks…
7 Aug 2024
GoSquared now integrates with Numerics, the number one data visualisation app for iOS and all Apple platforms. On all Apple... The post Numerics integration — bring GoSquared with you everywhere appeared first on GoSquared Blog.
11 Jan 2024
It’s been a while since I wrote an “attack of the week” post, and the fault for this is entirely mine. I’ve been much too busy writing boring posts about Schnorr signatures! But this week’s news brings an exciting story with both technical and political dimensions: new reports claim that Chinese security agencies have developed … Continue reading Attack of…
7 Dec 2022
You might have seen the news today that Apple is announcing a raft of improvements to Macs and iOS devices aimed at improving security and privacy. These include FIDO support, improvements to iMessage key verification, and a much anticipated announcement that the company is abandoning their plans for (involuntary) photo scanning. While every single one … Continue reading Why encrypted…
20 Jul 2021
This week a group of global newspapers is running a series of articles detailing abuses of NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware. If you haven’t seen any of these articles, they’re worth reading — and likely will continue to be so as more revelations leak out. The impetus for the stories is a leak comprising more than … Continue reading A case…
25 Mar 2021
Why the FBI can’t get your browsing history from Apple iCloud (and other scary stories)
Matthew GreenIt’s not every day that I wake up thinking about how people back up their web browsers. Mostly this is because I don’t feel the need to back up any aspect of my browsing. Some people lovingly maintain huge libraries of bookmarks and use fancy online services to organize them. I pay for one of … Continue reading Why the…
20 Jan 2021
The release of Apple Silicon-based Macs at the end of last year generated a flurry of news coverage and some surprises at the machine’s performance. This post details some background information on the experience of porting Firefox to run natively on these CPUs. The post Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon appeared first on Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog.
13 Oct 2019
This morning brings new and exciting news from the land of Apple. It appears that, at least on iOS 13, Apple is sharing some portion of your web browsing history with the Chinese conglomerate Tencent. This is being done as part of Apple’s “Fraudulent Website Warning”, which uses the Google-developed Safe Browsing technology as the … Continue reading How safe…
5 Jun 2019
At Monday’s WWDC conference, Apple announced a cool new feature called “Find My”. Unlike Apple’s “Find my iPhone“, which uses cellular communication and the lost device’s own GPS to identify the location of a missing phone, “Find My” also lets you find devices that don’t have cellular support or internal GPS — things like laptops, … Continue reading How does…
26 Apr 2018
Yesterday I happened upon a Wired piece by Steven Levy that covers Ray Ozzie’s proposal for “CLEAR”. I’m quoted at the end of the piece (saying nothing much), so I knew the piece was coming. But since many of the things I said to Levy were fairly skeptical — and most didn’t make it into the … Continue reading A…
16 Jan 2018
Last week Apple made an announcement describing changes to the iCloud service for users residing in mainland China. Beginning on February 28th, all users who have specified China as their country/region will have their iCloud data transferred to the GCBD cloud services operator in Guizhou, China. Chinese news sources optimistically describe the move as a way to … Continue reading…
5 Mar 2017
This morning on Twitter, Buzzfeed editor Miriam Elder asks the following question: Possibly stupid question: is the Signal desktop client as secure as the mobile app? — Miriam Elder (@MiriamElder) March 3, 2017 No, this is not a stupid question. Actually it’s an extremely important question, and judging by some of the responses to this … Continue reading Secure computing…
24 Nov 2016
Over the past few years we’ve heard more about smartphone encryption than, quite frankly, most of us expected to hear in a lifetime. We learned that proper encryption can slow down even sophisticated decryption attempts if done correctly. We’ve also learned that incorrect implementations can undo most of that security. In other words, phone encryption is an … Continue reading…
13 Aug 2016
TL;DR: No, it isn’t. If that’s all you wanted to know, you can stop reading. Has anybody noticed that Apple just gave a talk about how they secured a master key that would allow en-masse brute-forcing of device PINs — Pwn All The Things (@pwnallthethings) August 9, 2016 Still crazy how Apple went to BlackHat, … Continue reading Is Apple’s…
15 Jun 2016
Yesterday at the WWDC keynote, Apple announced a series of new security and privacy features, including one feature that’s drawn a bit of attention — and confusion. Specifically, Apple announced that they will be using a technique called “Differential Privacy” (henceforth: DP) to improve the privacy of their data collection practices. The reaction to this … Continue reading What is…
21 Mar 2016
Today’s Washington Post has a story entitled “Johns Hopkins researchers poke a hole in Apple’s encryption“, which describes the results of some research my students and I have been working on over the past few months. As you might have guessed from the headline, the work concerns Apple, and specifically Apple’s iMessage text messaging protocol. … Continue reading Attack of…
9 Sept 2015
Yesterday’s New York Times carried a story entitled “Apple and other tech companies tangle with U.S. over data access“. It’s a vague headline that manages to obscure the real thrust of the story, which is that according to reporters at the Times, Apple has not been forced to backdoor their popular encrypted iMessage system. This flies in … Continue reading…
26 Dec 2014
Woot! This project was featured on Hackaday. No Apple 1 under the tree on Christmas Day ? Never mind, with a 6502 and an Arduino Mega 2560 you can make your own. The Apple 1 was essentially a 6502 computer with 4k of RAM and 256 bytes of ROM. The inclusion of a 6821 PIA and a […]
4 Oct 2014
Last week I wrote about Apple’s new default encryption policy for iOS 8. Since that piece was intended for general audiences I mostly avoided technical detail. But since some folks (and apparently the Washington Post!) are still wondering about the nitty-gritty details of Apple’s design, I thought it might be helpful to sum up what we know … Continue reading…
23 Sept 2014
Blogging has been slow, but only because some of it has been redirected. There’s good stuff coming, including a neat post on the subject of RSA encryption and how it relates to the German army in World War II. In the meantime, please go read this (somewhat non-technical) piece I wrote for Slate on the … Continue reading Slate piece…
26 Jun 2013
About a year ago I wrote a short post urging Apple to publish the technical details of iMessage encryption. I’d love tell you that Apple saw my influential crypto blogging and fell all over themselves to produce a spec, but, no. iMessage is the same black box it’s always been. What’s changed is that suddenly people seem to … Continue…