| Website | https://www.mathyvanhoef.com |
| GitHub | https://github.com/vanhoefm |
| https://twitter.com/vanhoefm | |
| YouTube | https://youtube.com/@vanhoefm |
Our research on open tunneling servers got nominated for the Most Innovative Research award :)
The work will be presented by Angelos Beitis at Black Hat and also at USENIX Security
Brief summary and code: https://github.com/vanhoefm/tunneltester
Paper: https://papers.mathyvanhoef.com/usenix2025-tunnels.pdf
tl;dr: The European Commission is honestly asking for experts to advise them on ways to institute “effective and lawful access to data for law enforcement”. If you are an expert, I urge you to apply to join this group. You have until September 1st. Do read on for more details! The never-ending battle where police and intelligence services demand more/total access to communications shows no sign of stopping, even in the face of mathematical and practical impossibilities.
We are looking for members of the Artifact Evaluation Committee (AEC) of NDSS 2026. The Network and Distributed System Security symposium adopts an Artifact Evaluation (AE) process allowing authors to submit an artifact alongside accepted papers. The artifact may include source code, scripts, datasets, models, test suites, benchmarks, and/or any other material underlying the paper's contributions. The AE process aims to promote the reproducibility of experimental results and the dissemination of artifacts. Publishing an artifact immediately benefits how easily peers can build on it, use it as a comparison point, or solve questions about cases not considered by the original authors. The AEC reviews artifacts for how they may empower others for follow-up work and allows them to reproduce the results from the original paper. AEC membership in a top-tier venue can be very attractive for early-career researchers working in areas covered by NDSS. Notably, you may gain reviewing experience by critically reading about first-class research, and learn how to package experiments neatly (as well as what to expect when you will be an artifact author). We anticipate the AEC will consist mainly of experienced graduate students and postdocs. Junior students and young faculty members are also welcome to apply. As the work of the AEC takes place entirely online, you can be located anywhere in the world. The AE of NDSS comprises two rounds according to the following schedule: Summer cycle Artifact registration deadline: Tue, 8 Jul 2025 Artifact submission deadline: Mon, 14 Jul 2025 Kick-the-tires stage (preliminary questions for authors): Fri, 18 Jul 2025 to Fri, 25 Jul 2025 <in-depth reviewing - includes sending preliminary reviews for authors and online AEC discussions> Artifact decisions: Mon, 8 Sep 2025 Fall cycle Artifact registration deadline: Mon, 27 Oct 2025 Artifact submission deadline: Fri, 31 Oct 2025 Kick-the-tires stage (preliminary questions for authors): Tue, 4 Nov 2025 to Fri, 13 Nov 2025 <in-depth reviewing - includes sending preliminary reviews for authors and online AEC discussions> Artifact decisions: Mon, 15 Dec 2025 AEC members commit to serve for both cycles and to be responsive and active during the entire evaluation period. They are expected to bid for the artifacts they would like to review, to read the associated papers, to evaluate their assigned artifacts in depth, and in general to be available until each notification deadline. When submitting your self-nomination, please ensure you will have sufficient time and availability (e.g., holidays and other commitments) for the AEC during the two AE periods July 8th to September 8th 2025 and October 27th to December 15th 2025. The expected workload is 2 reviews for the Summer submission cycle and 3 for the Fall cycle. We estimate you will need 10-15 hours to assess each artifact. Additional details will be made available on the AE website: https://secartifacts.github.io/ndss2026/ We look forward to working with you! - NDSS 2026 Artifact Evaluation co-chairs Mathy Vanhoef (KU Leuven) and Daniele Antonioli (EURECOM)
All papers should publish their code. Help realize this by becoming an artifact reviewer at NDSS'26, apply here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdQGc5NsZnYqEW7MQw4ciXOc0UIIP4cxSo82WQxJpej42qlKA/viewform
You'll get to review artifacts of accepted top papers. We especially encourage junior/senior PhD students & PostDocs to help.
Awards will be given to distinguished reviewers.
We are looking for members of the Artifact Evaluation Committee (AEC) of NDSS 2026. The Network and Distributed System Security symposium adopts an Artifact Evaluation (AE) process allowing authors to submit an artifact alongside accepted papers. The artifact may include source code, scripts, datasets, models, test suites, benchmarks, and/or any other material underlying the paper's contributions. The AE process aims to promote the reproducibility of experimental results and the dissemination of artifacts. Publishing an artifact immediately benefits how easily peers can build on it, use it as a comparison point, or solve questions about cases not considered by the original authors. The AEC reviews artifacts for how they may empower others for follow-up work and allows them to reproduce the results from the original paper. AEC membership in a top-tier venue can be very attractive for early-career researchers working in areas covered by NDSS. Notably, you may gain reviewing experience by critically reading about first-class research, and learn how to package experiments neatly (as well as what to expect when you will be an artifact author). We anticipate the AEC will consist mainly of experienced graduate students and postdocs. Junior students and young faculty members are also welcome to apply. As the work of the AEC takes place entirely online, you can be located anywhere in the world. The AE of NDSS comprises two rounds according to the following schedule: Summer cycle Artifact registration deadline: Tue, 8 Jul 2025 Artifact submission deadline: Mon, 14 Jul 2025 Kick-the-tires stage (preliminary questions for authors): Fri, 18 Jul 2025 to Fri, 25 Jul 2025 <in-depth reviewing - includes sending preliminary reviews for authors and online AEC discussions> Artifact decisions: Mon, 8 Sep 2025 Fall cycle Artifact registration deadline: Mon, 27 Oct 2025 Artifact submission deadline: Fri, 31 Oct 2025 Kick-the-tires stage (preliminary questions for authors): Tue, 4 Nov 2025 to Fri, 13 Nov 2025 <in-depth reviewing - includes sending preliminary reviews for authors and online AEC discussions> Artifact decisions: Mon, 15 Dec 2025 AEC members commit to serve for both cycles and to be responsive and active during the entire evaluation period. They are expected to bid for the artifacts they would like to review, to read the associated papers, to evaluate their assigned artifacts in depth, and in general to be available until each notification deadline. When submitting your self-nomination, please ensure you will have sufficient time and availability (e.g., holidays and other commitments) for the AEC during the two AE periods July 8th to September 8th 2025 and October 27th to December 15th 2025. The expected workload is 2 reviews for the Summer submission cycle and 3 for the Fall cycle. We estimate you will need 10-15 hours to assess each artifact. Additional details will be made available on the AE website: https://secartifacts.github.io/ndss2026/ We look forward to working with you! - NDSS 2026 Artifact Evaluation co-chairs Mathy Vanhoef (KU Leuven) and Daniele Antonioli (EURECOM)
New version of the IEEE 802.11 standard that underpins Wi-Fi has been released. A total of 5969 pages!
The number of pages clearly keeps increasing. That includes more features to defend networks, but also more features to potentially abuse 👀
One of the most amazing things #demoscene has produced is creating art with insane platform / size limitations. Most of the time the constraints are coming from the platform or the rules, but sometimes they're self-imposed: Just because everyone else is doing bloaty stuff you don't have to.
Here are couple of my all time favourite intros/demos that totally blew my mind not only for their amazing presentation, design and technical execution but also for their insanely small size:
- RGBA & TBC: Elevated (intro, 4KB): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB0vBmiTr6o
- Farbrausch: fr-041: debris (demo, 177KB): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jY5Vrc5G0lk
- Alcatraz: Remnants (intro, 256 bytes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9jn6ExjDw8
- Mercury - fermi paradox (intro, 64KB): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX7ESVZ7T6Y
New @vanhoefm paper just dropped https://papers.mathyvanhoef.com/usenix2025-tunnels.pdf
Around 4 million hosts seem to accept various tunneled packets arbitrarily.
Now sharing open IP tunnel hosts in a new daily Open IP-Tunnel report https://shadowserver.org/what-we-do/network-reporting/open-ip-tunnel-report/
These hosts accept tunnelling packets such as IPIP, GRE without authenticating the source IPv4 or IPv6 addr, which can be abused for DoS/other attacks
~436K GRE & ~66K IPIP vulnerable IPs found on 2025-01-14
Geo breakdown (GRE/GRE6):
Geo breakdown (IPIP/IP6IP6):
These vulnerabilities were discovered by Angelos Beitis and Mathy Vanhoef @vanhoefm at the DistriNet Reseach Unit at KU Leuven University in Belgium. Thank you for the collaboration!
You can find more details on the vulnerabilities at: https://github.com/vanhoefm/tunneltester
DESCRIPTION LAST UPDATED: 2025-01-28 DEFAULT SECURITY LEVEL: MEDIUM This report contains information about a vulnerability that allows new Denial-of-Service (DoS) vulnerabilities. This vulnerability originates from hosts that accept tunnelling packets such as IPIP, GRE, 6in4 and 4in6 without authenticating the source IPv4 or IPv6 address. Attackers can exploit these hosts as proxies to conceal their […]
bert hubert 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇺🇦
Harry Sintonen
Dominic White
The Shadowserver Foundation