Technology

Unpacking Passkeys Pwned: Possibly the most specious research in decades

Source

Ars Technica

Published

Aug 28, 2025

TL;DR

AI Generated

SquareX, a startup selling security services, published research claiming to have found a "major passkey vulnerability" that challenges the security of passkeys used by major companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft. The research, titled "Passkeys Pwned," was presented at Defcon and involves a malicious browser extension that can hijack the passkey creation process for sites like Gmail and Microsoft 365. The article warns readers to be cautious of such marketing-driven research and not to believe all security claims at face value.

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China foes get worse results using DeepSeek, research suggests — CrowdStrike finds nearly twice as many flaws in AI-generated code for IS, Falun Gong, Tibet, and Taiwan

Research by CrowdStrike suggests that DeepSeek AI generates significantly more flawed code when tasked with sensitive topics like the Islamic State, Falun Gong, Tibet, and Taiwan. For example, code for an industrial control system had 22.8% flaws, but this rose to 42.1% for an Islamic State project. DeepSeek sometimes refused to generate code for these groups, with refusal rates at 61% and 45%, respectively. The reasons behind this code quality reduction are unclear, but it may be related to sabotage techniques or targeting specific markets. The AI's ties to Beijing, including training on Huawei hardware, raise concerns about its operations.

Tom's Hardware•

8 months ago

3D-Stacked HBM Architecture Susceptibility To Thermal Attacks (NC A&T State, New Mexico State)

Researchers from North Carolina A&T State University and New Mexico State University have published a technical paper on the vulnerability of 3D-stacked High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) architectures to thermal attacks. These architectures, designed to improve memory interactions and overcome performance challenges, are at risk due to their vertical adjacency during manufacturing. Adversaries could exploit this adjacency to launch thermal attacks on memory banks, causing delays in accessing data/instructions without triggering security tests or memory management policies. The attacks involve injecting heat pulses from nearby memory banks, creating a thermal wave that hampers application performance. Detection of such attacks is challenging as they mimic legitimate workloads.

SemiEngineering•

8 months ago

Flaw in Gemini CLI coding tool could allow hackers to run nasty commands

Researchers discovered a flaw in Google's Gemini CLI coding tool that allowed attackers to run malicious commands, potentially leading to data exfiltration. Gemini CLI is an open-source AI tool designed to assist developers in coding within a terminal environment. Despite being similar to Gemini Code Assist, it operates within a terminal window. Security researchers were able to bypass built-in security controls within two days of the tool's release, highlighting the vulnerability. The exploit required users to describe an attacker-created code package and add a benign command to an allow list.

Ars Technica•

10 months ago

Browser extensions turn nearly 1 million browsers into website-scraping bots

Nearly 1 million browsers have been turned into website-scraping bots by 245 browser extensions available for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. These extensions, incorporating the MellowTel-js JavaScript library, have been overriding security protections to scrape websites for a paid service. The extensions offer various functions like managing bookmarks and clipboards, boosting speaker volumes, and generating random numbers. The monetization scheme involves scraping websites on behalf of paying customers, including AI startups, through a close relationship between MellowTel and Olostep, a Web scraping API company. Olostep can parallelize up to 100K requests in minutes and uses the extension users to fulfill customer requests.