Prof. @KU_Leuven | Ex-Postdoc NYU | Network Security & Crypto | FragAttacks & KRACK | https://xitter.cf/t.co/cFWyCYRZyH
Orion Arm
Joined February 2011
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I found some design and implementation flaws in Wi-Fi again. All Wi-Fi devices are affected. It was a long ~9 months embargo, over this time a lot of info has been collected and that info now available at fragattacks.com
Mathy Vanhoef retweeted
How’s that FOMO holding up one month on? 👀
Whether you missed out or just want to relive the best bits, the unprompted.au talks are now online!
All the AI. All the cyber. None of the FOMO. 🐙
youtube.com/@unpromptedAU
Mathy Vanhoef retweeted
In a world where anyone can find bugs with a well-crafted /goal, the only impressive finds are in _bug-sparse_ code and interfaces (think vsftpd, iMessage, OpenSSH, etc).
Armadin researcher @mhskai2017 has uncovered an authenticated RCE vulnerability in Skype for Business Server (CVE-2026-70297, CVSS 8.8).
An attacker can exploit a path traversal vulnerability to write arbitrary files to the server while holding a valid token that can access any chat room with file-upload feature supported. No user interaction required. Patch immediately.
Updates are available for Skype for Business Server 2019 CU8, 2015 CU13, and Subscription Edition CU1.
Microsoft advisory: msrc.microsoft.com/update-gu…
Mathy Vanhoef retweeted
Walmart is selling real diamond earrings for $12.
Not a typo. Half-carat lab-grown diamonds, same carbon, graded by the same labs that grade the stone in your engagement ring. A jeweler can't tell them apart without a machine.
And that $12 price tag is why the company that invented the engagement ring is about to get sold for scrap.
De Beers ran the diamond trade for over a century. At its peak it controlled up to 90% of the world's rough supply, and when demand dipped it just locked diamonds in London vaults until prices came back. The slogan "A Diamond Is Forever" came from their ad agency in 1947. So did the rule that a ring should cost two months of your salary. Before that campaign, most American brides never got a diamond at all.
The whole thing held for 80 years because there were only so many mines. Then China started growing diamonds in reactors, and there's no vault on earth big enough to hide a factory's output.
Lab-grown wholesale prices have crashed roughly 96% from their peak, down to around $100 a carat. The Knot says 61% of engagement rings sold in 2025 had lab-grown center stones, up 239% since 2020. Even De Beers' own average selling price fell 32% in a year, to $105 a carat.
So Anglo American, which owns De Beers, has written it down by $6.8 billion in two years and is now in talks to sell the whole thing for about $1 billion. This is a company that was valued over $18 billion in 2001 and $13 billion as recently as 2011.
The stones coming out of the ground are the same as ever. The only scarce thing De Beers ever owned was the marketing, and marketing doesn't survive a $12 price tag at Walmart.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Walmart $12 0.5ct "Created White Diamond" studs (Paris Jewelry) often fail diamond testers per reviews and are not genuine lab-grown diamonds. Certified lab-grown 0.5ct pairs list around $79-89.
walmart.com/ip/14k-White-G…
walmart.com/ip/JeenMata-Ce…
Mathy Vanhoef retweeted
10 remarks on AI and math that can be true all at once:
1. The recent progress is stunning and exciting.
2. The Quasi-Riemann Hypothesis is arguably Fields-medal level.
3. Mathematics is being transformed and there is no way back.
4. OpenAI doesn't give a fuck about the future of mathematics.
5. Half-baked unreadable preprints claiming major results can effectively stall mathematical progress.
6. Some mathematicians are responding with naive, overly defensive comments.
7. The social-media wankers framing this as "OpenAI tramples gatekeeping" have no experience of mathematical research.
8. The product of mathematics is clarity and understanding. Not theorems, by themselves.
9. Mathematics is a critical infrastructure of human cognition. The human need for understanding isn't obsolete and it can't be offloaded to machines.
10. We haven't "solved" mathematics and we won't get there before the Sun burns out.
Mathy Vanhoef retweeted
The final post of my decompilation project is out.
83% of the functions are byte exact. We're hitting diminishing returns. The game runs flawlessly, so we're calling it done here.
For obvious reasons, no code will be shared.
momo5502.com/posts/2026-10-0…
Mathy Vanhoef retweeted
De impact van deze hack is echt bizar. Van alle Denen zijn hun naam, woonadres en BSN gestolen.
Deens bevolkingsregister gehackt, gegevens miljoenen mensen buitgemaakt rtl.nl/nieuws/buitenland/art…
Mathy Vanhoef retweeted
At this point it’s absurd and embarrassing. How many hundreds of billions in funding do you need to hire a security team that understands basic sandboxing and network isolation?
Mathy Vanhoef retweeted
Not a big name but this is very clearly true and we have strong evidence for it. Mythos failed to crack Firecracker.
It has largely exploited systems that are not particularly hard targets.
Existing tech can handle this when deployed properly.
Mathy Vanhoef retweeted
ICLR 2027 has received more submissions than all previous years (2013–2026) combined
Interview with SecureW2, where we look back on various Wi-Fi attacks and give network security advice to handle future attacks, especially in the age of AI securew2.com/signal/sneaking…
tl;dr: ensure a layered defense
Mathy Vanhoef retweeted
So one thing I’ve heard from multiple researchers in my field is that models seem to get *much* better at solving their specific problems over short periods, even asked in new contexts. Many of them have mentioned that they wonder if they’re training on their inputs.
Mathy Vanhoef retweeted
drama summary for those confused:
- Aug 15th: Tristan Buckmaster & Levent Alpöge make progress on a few important math problems
- they do NOT have a proof for the $1,000,000 Millenium Prize problem. BUT, they do claim to have a proof for a similar (non-Millenium) Navier Stokes problem that could help lead the way there
- Levent works at Anthropic, but this research was independent of his work there, with a mix of GPT and Claude models. Tristan is not related to Anthropic.
- Early Sep: Rumor spreads to OpenAI that Anthropic has solved a major problem. Tristan emails OpenAI to clarify. without revealing the problem they solved or how they did it.
- After hearing of the rumor, OpenAI started researching Navier Stokes with a new internal model.
- Sep 6th: OpenAI's Sebastien Bubeck tells Tristan that they solved the $1,000,000 Millenium Prize Navier Stokes problem. The approach is very similar to Tristan & Levent's approach to the non-Millenium problem.
- Tristan is suspicious of the timing, as only few others were trying this approach. OpenAI says the model didn't access his user data directly, but leaves unanswered whether Tristan's chat conversations were part of the training.
- OpenAI says they would partially credit Tristan for the $1,000,000 discovery (even though Tristan did not solve the $1,000,000 problem) — but only if they remove Levent as an author, as he works for Anthropic.
- Sep 8th: Tristan refuses to remove Levent, and rushes to publish their results independently.
Currently unclear is whether Anthropic had a separate solution for the $1,000,000 problem, or whether the rumor was about Tristan & Levent's independent research.
Mathy Vanhoef retweeted
You're missing the core drama of the story: Tristan is softly accusing OpenAI of having stolen their result from Codex chat logs.
Tristan then claims OpenAI tried to threaten him to not publicly disclose this, and that they'd give him the Clay Prize ($1M) as the "closest humans to the problem" if he'd agree to disavow his co-author, @__alpoge__ , who is at Anthropic.
This is HBO-level drama, but with math proofs.
Mathy Vanhoef retweeted
We’re sharing a solution to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, one of the deepest problems at the frontier of mathematics.
The proof was produced by a group of agents, using an OpenAI next-generation model significantly more capable than GPT-6 Astra.
The problem concerns whether the description of smooth three-dimensional fluid motion modeled by the Navier-Stokes equations can break down. It has remained unresolved for roughly 90 years.
Mathy Vanhoef retweeted
Security Testing of WireGuard Implementations, from @vanhoefm et al.
papers.mathyvanhoef.com/esor… [PDF]
Mathy Vanhoef retweeted
For most of history, surgery was done without anasthesia.
Fruit was a luxury: people used to rent pineapples to show them off at parties.
The sewing machine meant people no longer owned only 2-3 articles of clothing. Hand stitching clothing used to take 14 hours.
Ordinary abundance lives all around us.
My favorite quotes from people’s first reaction to these hidden marvels.
Highly recommend checking out ordinaryabundance.org to see mundaneness in a new light.
Ordinary Abundance. This is the greatest thing I've read in weeks. No kidding. This should win a Pulitzer in a category not yet invented. ordinaryabundance.com/
Mathy Vanhoef retweeted
The Nearest Neighbor Attack: A Unicorn or an Iceberg?
Revisiting the single public sighting of one of the most sophisticated Wi-Fi based APT attacks and why AI will make it worse
CC: @RGB_Lights @ImposeCost @stevenadair
medium.com/@TalBeerySec/the-…
Mathy Vanhoef retweeted
Ilya’s post is interesting to me because it sees explosion of papers as a momentary problem, rather than the death of the field proofsandintuitions.net/2026…
This refers to repeatedly connecting using different passwords & optimizing the speed of connection attempts
What's most interesting is that models can now do this kind of engineering. A while ago, they even struggled to answer details about the different types of WiFi frames
Mathy Vanhoef retweeted
human in the loop
the loop: “you’re doing amazing sweetie”
We asked an unreleased research version of Claude to take a stab at the Riemann hypothesis.
It didn’t solve it, but it did make strides on a related problem: it increased the lower bound for the fraction of zeros of the Riemann zeta function that satisfy the hypothesis from 41.6% to 67.2%.
anthropic.com/research/riema…
