Jake Appelbaum’s PhD thesis contains several new revelations from the classified NSA documents provided to journalists by Edward Snowden. Nothing major, but a few more tidbits. Kind of amazing that that all happened ten years ago. At this point, those documents are more historical than anything else. And it’s unclear who has those archives anymore. According to Appelbaum, The Intercept destroyed their copy. I recently published an essay about my experiences ten years ago.

This new protocol, called Oblivious DNS-over-HTTPS (ODoH), hides the websites you visit from your ISP. Here’s how it works: ODoH wraps a layer of encryption around the DNS query and passes it through a proxy server, which acts as a go-between the internet user and the website they want to visit. Because the DNS query is encrypted, the proxy can’t see what’s inside, but acts as a shield to prevent the DNS resolver from seeing who sent the query to begin with. IETF memo. The paper: Abstract: The Domain Name System (DNS) is the foundation of a human-usable Internet, responding to client queries for host-names with corresponding IP addresses and records. Traditional DNS is also unencrypted, and leaks user information to network operators. Recent efforts to secure DNS using DNS over TLS (DoT) and DNS over HTTPS (DoH) havebeen gaining traction, ostensibly protecting traffic and hiding content from on-lookers. However, one of the criticisms ofDoT and DoH is brought to bear by the small number of large-scale deployments (e.g., Comcast, Google, Cloudflare): DNS resolvers can associate query contents with client identities in the form of IP addresses. Oblivious DNS over HTTPS (ODoH) safeguards against this problem. In this paper we ask what it would take to make ODoH practical? We describe ODoH, a practical DNS protocol aimed at resolving this issue by both protecting the client’s content and identity. We implement and deploy the protocol, and perform measurements to show that ODoH has comparable performance to protocols like DoH and DoT which are gaining widespread adoption,while improving client privacy, making ODoH a practical privacy enhancing replacement for the usage of DNS...

There's a new, practical, collision attack against SHA-1: In this paper, we report the first practical implementation of this attack, and its impact on real-world security with a PGP/GnuPG impersonation attack. We managed to significantly reduce the complexity of collisions attack against SHA-1: on an Nvidia GTX 970, identical-prefix collisions can now be computed with a complexity of 261.2rather than264.7,...

Nice bit of adversarial machine learning. The image from this news article is most of what you need to know, but here's the research paper....

There is a side-channel attack against YubiKey access tokens that allows someone to clone a device. It’s a complicated attack, requiring the victim’s username and password, and physical access to their YubiKey—as well as some technical expertise and equipment. Still, nice piece of security analysis.