Dear Readers,
It is often difficult for me to write the Editor's letter. Although the letter is short and informal, choosing a few tidbits for it from the rising tide of events, research, and news items is a challenge. This time, facing another discouraging evening of writer's block, I decided to take my own frequent advice to my generation and tried using an AI tool - Anthropic's Claude AI.
I asked Claude to write the editor's letter for a security newsletter and to mention upcoming security conferences. Claude had these wise words: "The IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in May remains the premier venue for groundbreaking research, and this year's program committee has indicated an exceptionally strong submission pool." Is the submission pool actually "exceptionally strong" this year? It is always "strong", but I wonder about "exceptionally". Maybe I should try adding the prompt "Death to all modifiers." Anyway, I was encouraged by Claude's unprompted high regard for S&P.
Moving on, Claude expressed concern and hope: "Nation-state actors are more sophisticated, ransomware operations are increasingly professionalized, and the attack surface expands with each new connected device and cloud service. Yet the research community continues to rise to meet these challenges with creativity, rigor, and dedication." That kind of writing isn't my style (I often express despair over the research community's inability to eliminate the challenges). I almost abandoned the experiment, but I had one more query to try.
I asked Claude to write a parody based on the BRICKSTORM malware to close out the editor's letter, and this is what it produced:
A Brick-Layer's LamentClaude then congratulated itself for its "short, clever poem" and the attribution to original author "just as Hilarie Orman does." And so, I have succeeded in using AI to parody my own parody style, albeit with a rather disappointing "cleverness" score IMHO.
'Twas BRICKSTORM, and the slithy threats
Did burrow deep in vCenter's code;
All flimsy were the network sets,
And the backdoors silently bode.
Beware the BRICKSTORM, admin son!
The jaws that breach, the claws that steal!
Beware the APT, and shun
The firmware that conceals the real!
(With apologies to Lewis Carroll)
Claude recommended that I use the name "Dr. Sarah Chen" and that I tell you to "stay vigilant". I'll do neither, but I will urge you to keep the research fires burning next to the Yule log, and please do the writing yourself.