Migrating the US government to quantum-resistant cryptography is hard, luckily the gamer presidents are on it. This episode is extremely not safe for work, nor does it reflect the political opinions of, well, anybody.

"Security Cryptography Whatever" is hosted by Deirdre Connolly (@durumcrustulum), Thomas Ptacek (@tqbf), and David Adrian (@davidcadrian)

Apple has pulled the availability of their opt-in iCloud end-to-end encryption feature, called Advanced Data Protection, in the UK. This doesn't only affect UK Apple users, however.

To help us make sense of this surprising move from the fruit company, we got Matt Green, Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins, and Joe Hall, Distinguished Technologist at the Internet Society, on the horn.

Recorded Saturday February 22nd, 2025.

Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2025/02/24/apple-pulls-adp-in-uk/

Watch episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/LAn_yOGUkR0

Links:

- https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/apples-cloud-key-vault-and-secure-law-enforcement-access
- https://www.androidcentral.com/how-googles-backup-encryption-works-good-bad-and-ugly
- https://gdpr.eu/right-to-be-forgotten/
- https://www.legislation.gov.uk/id/ukpga/2024/9
- https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-censorship-data.html
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Typhoon
- Salt Typhoon: https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/news/strengthening-americas-resilience-against-prc-cyber-threats
- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-21/apple-removes-end-to-end-encryption-feature-from-uk-after-backdoor-order
- https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651

"Security Cryptography Whatever" is hosted by Deirdre Connolly (@durumcrustulum), Thomas Ptacek (@tqbf), and David Adrian (@davidcadrian)

'Let us model our large language model as a hash function—'

Sold.

Our special guest Nicholas Carlini joins us to discuss differential cryptanalysis on LLMs and other attacks, just as the ones that made OpenAI turn off some features, hehehehe.

Watch episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/vZ64xPI2Rc0

Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2025/01/28/cryptanalyzing-llms-with-nicholas-carlini/

Links:

- https://nicholas.carlini.com
- “Stealing Part of a Production Language Model”: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.06634
- ‘Why I attack"’: https://nicholas.carlini.com/writing/2024/why-i-attack.html
- “Cryptanalytic Extraction of Neural Network Models”, CRYPTO 2020: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.04884
- “Stochastic Parrots”: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922
- https://help.openai.com/en/articles/5247780-using-logit-bias-to-alter-token-probability-with-the-openai-api
- https://community.openai.com/t/temperature-top-p-and-top-k-for-chatbot-responses/295542
- https://opensource.org/license/mit
- https://github.com/madler/zlib
- https://ai.meta.com/blog/yann-lecun-ai-model-i-jepa/
- https://nicholas.carlini.com/writing/2024/how-i-use-ai.html

"Security Cryptography Whatever" is hosted by Deirdre Connolly (@durumcrustulum), Thomas Ptacek (@tqbf), and David Adrian (@davidcadrian)