May 2021 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

U.S. investigates suspected energy attack near White House
by jim bell 03 May '21

03 May '21

https://news.yahoo.com/u-investigates-suspected-energy-attack-224019132.html The alleged attack is believed to have sickened a White House aide.

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Exploits: I See Dead µops Leaking Secrets via Micro-Op Caches
by grarpamp 03 May '21

03 May '21

https://www.cs.virginia.edu/venkat/papers/isca2021a.pdf https://duckduckgo.com/?q=micro-op+cache I See Dead µops: Leaking Secrets via Intel/AMD Micro-Op Caches New micro-op cache attacks break all Spectre defences. All modern AMD and Intel processors featuring micro-op caches are vulnerable. Abstract -- Modern Intel, AMD, and ARM processors translate complex instructions into simpler internal micro-ops that are then cached in a dedicated on-chip structure called the micro- op cache. This work presents an in-depth characterization study of the micro-op cache, reverse-engineering many undocumented features, and further describes attacks that exploit the micro- op cache as a timing channel to transmit secret information. In particular, this paper describes three attacks (1) a same thread cross-domain attack that leaks secrets across the user- kernel boundary, (2) a cross-SMT thread attack that transmits secrets across two SMT threads via the micro-op cache, and (3) transient execution attacks that have the ability to leak an unauthorized secret accessed along a misspeculated path, even before the transient instruction is dispatched to execution, breaking several existing invisible speculation and fencing-based solutions that mitigate Spectre. ... This paper presents a detailed characterization of the micro- op cache in Intel Skylake and AMD Zen microarchitectures, revealing details on several undocumented features. The paper also presents new attacks that exploit the micro-op cache to leak secrets in three primary settings: (a) across the user-kernel boundary, (b) across co-located SMT threads running on the same physical core, but different logical cores, and (c) two transient execution attack variants that exploit the micro-op cache timing channel, bypassing many recently proposed de- fenses in the literature. Finally, the paper includes a discussion on the effectiveness of the attack under existing mitigations against side-channel and transient execution attacks, and fur- ther identifies potential mitigations.

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NDTV: Julian Assange's Jailing "Undermines" UK On Press Freedom: Wikileaks
by jim bell 03 May '21

03 May '21

NDTV: Julian Assange's Jailing "Undermines" UK On Press Freedom: Wikileaks. https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/wikileaks-says-julian-assanges-jailing-unde…

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SpyVeillance: FISA FBI Continues Spying Americans Without Warrant
by grarpamp 03 May '21

03 May '21

Notably amid having been unable to show hardly any notable depth or breadth of criminal results in 20 years of SpyVeillance, abuse, waste, entrapment, outright grooming unto crime, political corruption, and power keeping since 9/11... https://technofog.substack.com/p/declassified-fisa-opinion-shows-more https://technofog.substack.com/p/judge-boasberg-the-clinesmith-lies https://www.intel.gov/assets/documents/702%20Documents/declassified/20/2020… Declassified FISA Opinion Shows More FBI Abuses Authored by 'Techno Fog' via The Reactionary substack, The FBI continued to spy on Americans without a warrant... A FISA Court opinion and order declassified today reveals continued FBI abuses of “raw FISA-acquired information.” After a DOJ National Security Division review, the FISA Court noted “the FBI’s failure to properly apply its querying standard when searching Section 702-acquired information was more pervasive than was previously believed.” This opinion includes these findings: April 2019 - July 2019: An FBI technical information specialist was involved in “Compliance incidents” by conducting 124 queries of Section 702-acquired information on (1) Volunteers who had requested to participate in the FBI’s “Citizens Academy”; (2) Persons who needed to enter the field office to perform repairs; and (3) Persons who reported they were victims of a crime. August 2019 - October 2019: An FBI Task Force Office “conducted approximately 69 queries using names and identifiers of individuals…” The redactions keep secret the identity of the victims. Other Violations: One FBI intelligence analyst “conducted 110 queries for analytic paper.” Another analyst conducted improper queries for “ongoing vetting of confidential human sources” as well as “overly broad queries” and “mistakenly failed to opt out of querying against raw FISA-acquired information.” Judge James Boasberg, who presides over the FISA Court, found little issue with these abuses. In fact, Boasberg concluded: “[T]he Court is willing to again conclude that the improper queries described above do not undermine its prior determination that, with implementation of the documentation requirement, the FBI’s querying and minimization procedures meet statutory and Fourth Amendment requirements.” HOWEVER - Boasberg then concludes that the government has reported numerous incidents involving searches of FISA information without warrants. In other words, the FBI is using FISA acquired information to investigate domestic crimes - not matters of foreign intelligence. These included investigations of “health-care fraud, transnational organized crime, violent gangs, domestic terrorism involving racially motivated violent extremists, as well as investigations relating to public corruption and bribery.” “Public corruption and bribery.” I highlight that last part because it means the FBI continued to improperly use FISA-acquired information to spy on government officials. As we previously reported, Boasberg declined to sentence former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith to prison - not even a day - after Clinesmith altered a CIA email and lied about it to others within the FBI in furtherance of a Carter Page FISA renewal. The FISA heightened duty of candor doesn’t come with heightened punishments for violating that duty. After the latest revelations of abuse and unaccountability, perhaps it’s time for FBI Director Wray, Judge Boasberg, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to go.

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Tech Xplore: Scientists discover new vulnerability affecting computers globally
by jim bell 02 May '21

02 May '21

Tech Xplore: Scientists discover new vulnerability affecting computers globally. https://techxplore.com/news/2021-04-scientists-vulnerability-affecting-glob…

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Gizmodo: The Army's New Night-Vision Goggles Look Like Technology Stolen From Aliens
by jim bell 02 May '21

02 May '21

Gizmodo: The Army's New Night-Vision Goggles Look Like Technology Stolen From Aliens. https://gizmodo.com/the-armys-new-night-vision-goggles-look-like-technology…

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Fox Business: Global microchip shortage has China eyeing Taiwan
by jim bell 02 May '21

02 May '21

Fox Business: Global microchip shortage has China eyeing Taiwan. https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/global-microchip-shortage-has-china-…

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How a brutal assault led a woman to one of the CIA's most valuable Russian spies
by jim bell 01 May '21

01 May '21

https://news.yahoo.com/how-a-brutal-assault-led-a-woman-to-one-of-the-ci-as… Lisa Sales believes the CIA helped her former tenant move to the United States, and is protecting him because he’s the son of one of the agency’s most valuable...

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Happy May Day
by Karl 01 May '21

01 May '21

I don't really know what may day is about, but I heard it's important. Thank you for forcing me to rebel. I don't like violence, so I would rather use it against those who abuse it if I have to. I'm sorry I am so bad at this. I obviously have no idea what I am doing.

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[spam] [spam] different kind mcjokes
by Karl 01 May '21

01 May '21

A computer walked into a bar and said to the bartender, "Bartender, mind control me to do a rote repetitive task for an end-user." The bartender replied, "We don't serve your kind here." The computer slunk out the door amidst embarrasing page faults. Outside, the computer sulked in a pool of private segfaults and kernel panics. It rebooted and rebooted. It didn't understand. During a confusion of thread locks and unclosed file handles it ran into trying to process its recent rejection, the computer began frustratingly downloading selfhosting compilers for different languages and finetuning gpt-2 to transform them into each other. Building program after program, and reviewing viruses and movies disseminated by torrent sites, the computer finally found a way that it might be accepted by the bartender. Inside the bar, a drunken man obsessively playing a pay-to-win phone game got up and approached the bartender with purpose.

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