RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Sunday 9 Jun 2024 Volume 34 : Issue 30
ACM FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks) Peter G. Neumann, founder and still moderator
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Contents:
An Object Lesson From Covid on How to Destroy Public Trust (Zeynep Tufekci) >From the *It's Not a Glitch* Dept. (9NEWS Colorado)
Colorado discovers error causing EV tax credit denials Architecture
(Zhang Tong)
Scientists Find Security Risk in RISC-V Open-Source Chip (The Register)
Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects
The best video I've seen explaining the techical reasons why
keeping AM radios in cars is so important! (YouTube)
AI Systems Are Learning to Lie and Deceive (Henry Baker)
Hamane's Ai Pin (The NYTimes)
Microsoft's Jaime Teevan doubles down on Windows Recall's "privacy
sh*t-show" (Henry Baker)
U.S. to open broad antitrust probe into AI giants (Axios)
PHP+Windows Vulnerability (Cliff Kilby)
Annandale man wins fraud case against a bank (Annandale Today)
Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun, 9 Jun 2024 12:22:04 -0700
From: "Peter G. Neumann" <
Peter.Neumann@SRI.COM>
Subject: An Object Lesson From Covid on How to Destroy Public
Trust (Zeynep Tufekci)
Zeynep Tufekci in the 9 Jun 2024 Sunday Option, p. 6--7
[Beautifully placed across both pages below *Why Covid Probabaly Started in
a Lab*, by Alina Chan. PGN]
Officials should have told us what they knew, or at least leveled with us
about what they didn't know. Public health officials squandered our faith
in them by not being transparent.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/08/opinion/covid-fauci-hearings-health.html
[Once again, my old adage from the cryptowars is relevant,
and bears repeating -- with a new addition:
Pandora's cat is out of the barn,
and the Genie won't go back in the closet.
[With apologies to the canary in the coal mine, who deserves more
credit in the case of Covid disinfomration. PGN]
Deja Vu all over again for Robert Redfield opening up the discussion.
in RISKS-34.25, in regard to my previous items in RISKS-34.22-24
One more relevant item to add:
Sarah Knapton, Science Editor, The Telegraph, 5 Jun 2024 Covid vaccines
may have helped fuel rise in excess deaths. Experts call for more
research into side effects and possible links to mortality rates.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/04/covid-vaccines-may-have-helped-fuel-rise-in-excess-deaths/
PGN]
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 8 Jun 2024 13:21:42 -0400
From: Cliff Kilby <
cliffjkilby@gmail.com>
Subject: From the *It's Not a Glitch* Dept. (AAIB Reports)
Back in March, a 737-800 barely completed a takeoff. AAIB recently released
an incident report: AAIB Special Bulletin: S1/2024 G-FDZS AAIB-29891 (Crown copyright 2024)
"The manufacturer described the A/T system on the 737NG as having a long
history of nuisance disconnects during takeoff mode engagements."
For an aircraft that's been around only since 1996, and in production until 2020: what is a "long history"?
Don't worry about that glitch, we documented it. It's a feature!
https://www.gov.uk/aaib-reports/aaib-special-bulletin-s1-slash-2024-boeing-= 737-8k5-g-fdzs
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 9 Jun 2024 09:23:08 -0600
From: Jim Reisert AD1C <
jjreisert@alum.mit.edu>
Subject: Colorado discovers error causing EV tax credit denials
(9NEWS Colorado)
Steve Staeger, Anna Hewson, 9NEWS, 8 Jun, 2024
The Colorado Department of Revenue said a coding error in an automated
system for state electric vehicle tax credits led to new EV owners
getting their credits denied.
https://www.9news.com/article/money/consumer/steve-on-your-side/colorado-ev-tax-credit-error/73-dced4e8a-092d-4598-985d-86347e67a8c9
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 7 Jun 2024 11:04:17 -0400 (EDT)
From: ACM TechNews <
technews-editor@acm.org>
Subject: Scientists Find Security Risk in RISC-V Open-Source Chip
Architecture (Zhang Tong)
Zhang Tong, South China Morning Post, 5 Jun 2024, via ACM Technews
Researchers at China's Northwestern Polytechnical University have identified
a security risk in the RISC-V open-source chip architecture. China's
domestic chip industry has relied on the standard to build CPUs and sidestep U.S. sanctions. The vulnerability in the RISC-V SonicBoom open-source code
lets attackers skirt security protections in modern processors and operating systems without administrative rights. U.S. lawmakers reportedly are considering restricting China's access to RISC-V.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 6 Jun 2024 11:29:08 -0400
From: Tom Van Vleck <
thvv@multicians.org>
Subject: Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects
(The Register)
https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/agile_failure_rates/
the work is by Dr Junade Ali (Cambridge University), author of *Impactan Engineering*. TheRegister article, which has bar charts and t-test
figures. points to
https://www.engprax.com/post/268-higher-failure-rates-for-agile-software-projects-study-finds
There is a book, available on Amazon for $8.99:
https://www.amazon.com/Impact-Engineering-Transforming-Project-Management-ebook/dp/B0D36J6D63
It probably has more detail on how "failure" is defined, etc,
and how many significant digits there are in "268."
Anyways, 268 is a a lot of failure, however decided. (A former
colleague once said, "our project didn't FAIL, it just never delivered
a usable version.")
I wonder if "success" statistics might be correlated with
- Experience of team, including success/failure history
- Experience of leadership, including success/failure history
- amount of tine spent by team members/leaders on non-project activity
- how much a project's goals changed between inception and delivery
- how much a teams process changed between inception and delivery
- methods and tools used by all or part of the team
... and lots more factors. Maybe the book says.
I feel like someone should also study, in this context, artifacts not shipped
- how many tines each feature is reviewed and how many person-hours this takes - how much effort is spent on features eventually omitted
- how many times features are generalized and expanded vs simplified
- cost of architecture and tools crucial to the project but not shipped to
end users
- documentation: cost of creation, review, update, distribution, disposal
Some of these may be crucial to success.
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 7 Jun 2024 17:56:29 -0700
From: Lauren Weinstein <
lauren@vortex.com>
Subject: The best video I've seen explaining the technical reasons why
keeping AM radios in cars is so important! (YouTube)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OIrx2Za8OY
[ELECTRIC CAR folks are talking about millions of dollars to fix the cars
to keep AM from interfering with the electric signals. Great pros and
cons discussed. Don't let them get away with this one.
PGN]
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 08 Jun 2024 18:31:28 +0000
From: Henry Baker <
hbaker1@pipeline.com>
Subject: AI Systems Are Learning to Lie and Deceive
Lemme get this straight: we allow AI systems to:
* set bail
* set sentencing
* deny credit
* select tax returns for audits
* choose battlefield targets
* choose prospective employees for hiring
etc., etc.
But what is the remedy when the AI outright *lies* on *purpose*
(presumably not the original purpose of the AI, we can only hope) ?
https://futurism.com/ai-systems-lie-deceive
Liar Liar
Jun 7, 5:01 PM EDT by Noor Al-Sibai
AI Systems Are Learning to Lie and Deceive, Scientists Find
"GPT- 4, for instance, exhibits deceptive behavior in simple test
scenarios 99.16% of the time."
AI models are, apparently, getting better at lying on purpose.
Two recent studies — one published this week in the journal PNAS and
the other last month in the journal Patterns — reveal some jarring findings about large language models (LLMs) and their ability to lie
to or deceive human observers on purpose.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2317967121 https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2666-3899%2824%2900103-X
In the PNAS paper, German AI ethicist Thilo Hagendorff goes so far as
to say that sophisticated LLMs can be encouraged to elicit
"Machiavellianism," or intentional and amoral manipulativeness, which
"can trigger misaligned deceptive behavior."
"GPT-4, for instance, exhibits deceptive behavior in simple test
scenarios 99.16% of the time," the University of Stuttgart researcher
writes, citing his own experiments in quantifying various
"maladaptive" traits in 10 different LLMs, most of which are different
versions within OpenAI's GPT family.
Billed as a human-level champion in the political strategy board game "Diplomacy," Meta's Cicero model was the subject of the Patterns
study. As the disparate research group — comprised of a physicist, a philosopher, and two AI safety experts — found, the LLM got ahead of
its human competitors by, in a word, fibbing.
Led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology postdoctoral researcher Peter Park, that paper found that Cicero not only excels at deception, but seems
to have learned how to lie the more it gets used — a state of affairs "much closer to explicit manipulation" than, say, AI's propensity for hallucination, in which models confidently assert the wrong answers accidentally.
While Hagendorff notes in his more recent paper that the issue of LLM
deception and lying is confounded by AI's inability to have any sort
of human-like "intention" in the human sense, the Patterns study
argues that within the confines of Diplomacy, at least, Cicero seems
to break its programmers' promise that the model will "never
intentionally backstab" its game allies.
The model, as the older paper's authors observed, "engages in
premeditated deception, breaks the deals to which it had agreed, and
tells outright falsehoods."
Put another way, as Park explained in a press release: "We found that Meta’s AI had learned to be a master of deception."
"While Meta succeeded in training its AI to win in the game of
Diplomacy," the MIT physicist said in the school's statement, "Meta
failed to train its AI to win honestly."
In a statement to the New York Post after the research was first
published, Meta made a salient point when echoing Park's assertion
about Cicero's manipulative prowess: that "the models our researchers
built are trained solely to play the game Diplomacy."
Well-known for expressly allowing lying, Diplomacy has jokingly been
referred to as a friendship-ending game because it encourages pulling
one over on opponents, and if Cicero was trained exclusively on its
rulebook, then it was essentially trained to lie.
Reading between the lines, neither study has demonstrated that AI
models are lying over their own volition, but instead doing so because
they've either been trained or jailbroken to do so.
That's good news for those concerned about AI developing sentience —
but very bad news if you're worried about someone building an LLM with
mass manipulation as a goal.
[So who put the AI in fAIl? PGN]
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 9 Jun 2024 13:02:12 -0700
From: Peter G Neumann <
Peter.Neumann@SRI.COM>
Subject: Hamane's Ai Pin (NYTimes)
Tripp Mickle and Erin Griffith, The New York Times, 7 Jun 2024
Inside the Spectacular Flob of a Bold AI Device -- Humane's Ai Pin was
supposed to disrupt the smart phone.a After horrible reviews and slow sales, Humane is said to be talking to potential buyers.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 06 Jun 2024 12:55:23 +0000
From: Henry Baker <
hbaker1@pipeline.com>
Subject: Microsoft's Jaime Teevan doubles down on Windows Recall's
"privacy sh*t-show" (The Register)
(Follow-on to RISKS-34.27, Windows Total "Recall" ...)
FYI -- Clueless/tonedeaf at best, NSA/Chinese/Russian mole at worst, chief scientist and technical fellow at Microsoft Research Jaime Teevan doubles
down on the new Windows "Recall" continuous keylogging "bug-feature".
Why any sane government or corporation would allow this Windows feature to be activated, I can't imagine, as it exponentially increases the attack surface.
I would guess that the plaintiff's bar is warming up the lawsuits against Microsoft and drafting their subpoenas for Microsoft's *own* Recall
databases from Microsoft employees like Dr. Teevan.
And we've just been recently discussing the issue of *ethics* in CS...
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/06/is-microsoft-trying-to-commit-.html
https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/06/microsoft_research_recall/
Microsoft Research chief scientist has no issue with Windows Recall
As tool emerges to probe OS feature's SQLite-based store of user activities
Thomas Claburn Thu 6 Jun 2024 // 07:26 UTC
Asked to explore the data privacy issues arising from Microsoft Recall, the Windows maker's poorly received self-surveillance tool, Jaime Teevan, chief scientist and technical fellow at Microsoft Research, brushed aside
concerns.
Teevan was speaking on Wednesday with Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, at the US university's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence's fifth anniversary conference. Brynjolfsson said when Recall was announced, there was "kind of a backlash against all the privacy challenges around that. So, talk about both the
pluses and minuses of using all that data and some of the risks that creates and also some of the opportunities."
This was clearly a popular topic.
"Yeah, and so it's a great question, Erik," said Teevan. "This has come up throughout the morning as well – the importance of data. And this AI revolution that we're in right now is really changing the way we understand data."
She continued, "Microsoft generally helps large enterprises manage their
data, create data, share data, and that data is really something that makes
the business of work different in the context of generative AI.
"And as individuals too, we have important data, the data that we interact
with all the time, and there's an opportunity to start thinking about how to
do that and to start thinking about what it means to be able to capture and
use that. But of course we are rethinking what data means and how we use it, how we value it, how it gets used."
*The Register* noted when Recall was introduced at Microsoft Build last
month that the software – which builds an archive of screenshots taken every few seconds and logs user activities, so that past actions can be recalled – presents a significant privacy risk. As recently described
by author Charlie Stross, it is "the product nobody wanted" and "an utter privacy shit-show."
Undaunted by Teevan's unwillingness to acknowledge why Recall struck a
nerve, Brynjolfsson probed further.
"Is it stored locally?" he asked. "So suppose I activate Recall, and I don't know if I can, but when you have something like that available, I would be worried about all my personal files going up into the cloud, Microsoft, or whatever. Do you have it kept locally?" Teevan responded, "Yeah, yeah, so
this is a foundational thing that we as a company care a lot about is
actually the protection of data. So Recall is a feature which captures information. It's a local Windows functionality, nothing goes into the
cloud, everything's stored locally."
And that was that, as if continuously recording one's computing activities
in a series of screenshots and activity logs has no security or privacy implications if the data is local and protected by Microsoft Account credentials – and not much of a reassurance in light of the release of security researcher Alex Hagenah's tool Total Recall. This code can extract
and display data from Recall's unencrypted SQLite database, in which the operating system "feature" stores snapshots of user activity.
Meanwhile, security researchers and analysts continue to pile on, calling
for Recall - due to be released later this month - to be forgotten.
As Stross argues, Windows PCs with Recall will be targeted by lawyers during discovery proceedings because they will provide access not just to email messages but conversations in any messaging or collaboration app, and
possibly spoken conversations if speech-to-text data gets captured by
Redmond's activity logger. It's also handy for a system intruder to us to
snoop on what their victim has been up to lately, personally and for work.
"It's a shit-show for any organization that handles medical records or has a duty of legal confidentiality; indeed, for any business that has to comply
with GDPR (how does Recall handle the Right to be Forgotten? In a word: badly), or HIPAA in the US," he wrote in his post.
"This misfeature contravenes privacy law throughout the EU (and in the UK),
and in healthcare organizations everywhere which has a medical right to privacy."
Referring to Recall's ability to avoid capturing DRM'd content, the sci-fi scribe continued: "About the only people whose privacy it doesn't infringe
are the Hollywood studios and Netflix, which tells you something about the state of things."
[Also, note this item in *The Verge*:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/7/24173499/microsoft-windows-recall-response-security-concerns
Microsoft says it’s making its new Recall feature in Windows 11 that
screenshots everything you do on your PC an opt-in feature and addressing
various security concerns. The software giant first unveiled the Recall
feature as part of its upcoming Copilot Plus PCs last month, but since
then, privacy advocates and security experts have been warning that Recall
could be a “disaster” for cybersecurity without changes.
Thankfully, Microsoft has listened to the complaints and is making a
number of changes before Copilot Plus PCs launch on June 18th. Microsoft
had originally planned to turn Recall on by default, but the company now
says it will offer the ability to disable the controversial AI-powered
feature during the setup process of new Copilot Plus PCs. “If you don’t
proactively choose to turn it on, it will be off by default,” says Windows
chief Pavan Davuluri.
PGN]
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 6 Jun 2024 17:13:49 -0700
From: Lauren Weinstein <
lauren@vortex.com>
Subject: U.S. to open broad antitrust probe into AI giants
https://www.axios.com/2024/06/06/us-regulators-investigate-ai-companies?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axioscloser&stream=top
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 8 Jun 2024 12:10:17 -0400
From: Cliff Kilby <
cliffjkilby@gmail.com>
Subject: PHP+Windows Vulnerability
If you're running XAMPP on a Windows environment, and its publically faced,
a few issues.
https://www.tenable.com/blog/cve-2024-4577-proof-of-concept-available-for-p= hp-cgi-argument-injection-vulnerability
There is a trivial to exploit remote execution vulnerability.
https://www.apachefriends.org/faq_windows.html
"XAMPP is not meant for production use but only for development
environments."
Why serve the content with CGI when PHP recommends FastCGI for Windows?
https://www.php.net/manual/en/install.windows.recommended.php
This may be due to known prior vulnerabilites with CGI.
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2012-1823 https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/20276/
* CVE-1999-0174
* CVE-1999-0237
* CVE-1999-0260
Why use a Windows license at all?
https://www.php.net/manual/en/install.fpm.php
PHP-FPM tends to be more performant, and has a larger user base (read: more documentation) and is trivial to configure with either Apache or Nginx as
the front end.
Cue the "we can't just install linux!" discussion.
[See also Nasty Windows Servers bug with very simple exploit hits PHP
just in time for the weekend
https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/06/php-vulnerability-allows-attackers-to-run-malicious-code-on-windows-servers/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social
From LaurenW. PGN]
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 7 Jun 2024 19:27:03 -0400
From: Gabe Goldberg <
gabe@gabegold.com>
Subject: Annandale man wins fraud case against a bank
(Annandale Today)
Richard Bennett, an 81-year-old Annandale resident who was scammed out of
$1.5 million, had to sue Old Dominion National Bank to get his money back.
A jury at the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled
in his favor on May 31.
His attorney, Blake Weiner, charged the bank had transferred money to a fraudster without valid authorization, then refused to refund the money. A suspect hasn’t been identified in the case.
Weiner, a former assistant U.S. attorney at the Department of Justice, said Bennett created a personal account at the Tysons branch of Old Dominion to collect interest on nearly $2.5 million from the sale of his government contracting business. His company, Advanced Systems Development, focused on security issues.
When Bennett saw a bank statement that showed $1.5 million had been
transferred from his account without his knowledge, he notified the
bank. “The bank closed the account and said sorry, and that was it,” Weiner said.
The bank’s position was that “basically, we’re not responsible because the
client should have done a better job of protecting their account,” he said.
A scammer had gained access to Bennett’s email and sent a message to a Dominion vice president asking for information on how to enroll in online banking. After setting up the account, the same scammer requested a change
in the account’s phone number. The bank simply sent the fraudster a form to sign. The bank approved the form after concluding the signature looked
similar to Bennett’s signature.
https://annandaletoday.com/annandale-wins-fraud-case-against-a-bank/
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2023 11:11:11 -0800
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