Alex Stamos
speaker
37 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Alex Stamos’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
One of the things they've done is they've created security protections where if something bad happens, they can try to protect that if you hack one of those subsystems, that hopefully they can contain that hack and keep them from taking over the entire phone.
No, take over the entire.
So there's a company in Israel called NSO Group that sells these hacks and is very good at it. You know, the Russians do this, the Chinese do this. So the Chinese government's actually quite good at this.
So there's what are called interaction and non-interaction hacks. So there have been ones that are so bad that the message is delivered and in the background, your phone parses the message. They take over your phone and then they delete the message. You don't even know you got hacked. And then they plant the malware on your phone.
And now they can read all your messages, read your email, and even in some cases, turn on the microphone, turn on the camera, track your GPS location and such. And that's been used against democracy activists, it's been used against journalists and such. It's really bad.
I mean, it's possible. It is possible. This is this, that this is, if you pull this thread, you find a big hole in the sweater on the other side. You know, this kind of bug, it's not super likely, but it is possible. I have seen more minor things than this turn out to be a highly exploitable condition. So yeah, it is possible.
This feels like around seven seconds here. But back to Alex's tests. There's a bunch of errors getting thrown around the IAM transcoder agent.
None of the errors here, it gives us a perfect, but this is pretty good.
You know, there's a saying that you hear software people say, it's turtles all the way down, right? Like, you know, something I tell my Stanford students is that security is an incredible field to get into because it's the only part of computer science that gets worse every year, right? Like every part of CS just magically gets better, right?
Like graphics and compute and storage, but systems get more complex, right? less understandable and more important every year. And so as a result, systems get less safe and there's more need for people to break them and make them safer. And I think AI has just massively multiplied that. I mean, this is one of the weird things about AI. Just...
Theoretically, AI systems are supposed to be what's called deterministic, right? So a deterministic system is a piece of software where if you know the inputs, you can predict what the outputs are. In practice to human beings, modern AI systems are non-deterministic. We have no fricking idea why they work.
Like we just build these things and we train them on these huge training sets and then they just kind of happen. Right? Like, they just kind of do things.
Like, we are building software systems that are beyond human comprehension. And we're throwing them in our pockets and then building our lives around them.
And this is another thing I tell my students. It is the most exciting time to be in security since the late 90s because, once again... new kinds of vulnerabilities and bugs are being discovered every day of new entire classes of issues, right? This is what it was like when I was young.
You'd go to a security conference, you'd go to a DEF CON or Black Hat, and you'd go to a talk, and somebody would get on stage and they would talk about some new research. You would leave and you'd be like, wow, I think every single product on the planet is vulnerable to that bug because nobody's ever heard of it, right? And that's what AI is like right now, is that
You know, somebody might say we built a secure AI system and you're like, you can't make that promise because nobody knows what the vulnerabilities are in these systems yet. Like just the fundamental research hasn't been done yet. And so it is like both a terrifying and really fun time to be alive if you're in this field.
Yeah, thanks, BJ.
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