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How Plex is doing HTTPS for all its users
This week Plex , a self-hosted media server, announced that they now offer TLS to secure all connections, including those to the user’s servers. This is actually pretty interesting.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 55 posts.
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What’s the matter with PGP?
Last Thursday, Yahoo announced their plans to support end-to-end encryption using a fork of Google’s end-to-end email extension. This is a Big Deal. With providers like Google and Yahoo onboa…
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Data is a Toxic Asset
Thefts of personal information aren’t unusual. Every week, thieves break into networks and steal data about people, often tens of millions at a time. Most of the time it’s information that’s needed to commit fraud, as happened in 2015 to Experian and the IRS. Sometimes it’s stolen for purposes of embarrassment or…
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How Safe Browsing Works in Firefox
Firefox has had support for Google's Safe Browsing since 2005 when it started as a stand-alone Firefox extension . At first it was only available in the USA, but it was opened up to the rest of the world in 2006 and moved to the Google Toolbar . It then got integrated directly into Firefox 2.0 before the public launch…
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My Experience With the Great Firewall of China
When I recently visited China for the first time,as an InfoSec professional I was very curious to finally be able to poke at theGreatFirewall of China with m...
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Blocking-resistant communication through domain fronting
David Fifield, University of California, Berkeley Chang Lan, University of California, Berkeley Rod Hynes, Psiphon Inc Percy Wegmann, Brave New Software Vern Paxson, University of California, Berkeley and the International Computer Science Institute
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“Subject: Urgent Warning”
Back in December I got a desperate email from this person. A woman who said her Instagram had been hacked and since she found my contact info in the app she mailed me and asked for help. I of course replied and said that I have nothing to do with her being hacked but I … Continue reading “Subject: Urgent Warning” →
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Counterfeit Macbook charger teardown: convincing outside but dangerous inside
What's inside a counterfeit Macbook charger? After my Macbook charger teardown , a reader sent me a charger he suspected was counterfeit. ...
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I would like Debian to stop shipping XScreenSaver
If any of you reading this have decision-making ability along those lines, I would appreciate your assistance in making this happen. If you're wondering why: they are still shipping a version of my software that I released in 2014. Since that's roughly a decade in software years, it recently began popping up a single…
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Typosquatting programming language package managers
Edit: It seems that the blog post and the thesis caused quite some interest. Please contact me under the following mail address: admin [|[at]|] incolumitas [[|dot|]] com In this blog post, it is demonstrated how 17000 computers were forced to execute arbitrary code by typosquatting programming language…
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Zero Knowledge Proofs: An illustrated primer (2014)
One of the best things about modern cryptography is the beautiful terminology. You could start any number of punk bands (or Tumblrs) named after cryptography terms like ‘hard-core predicate&#…
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Cryptographic Agility
( These are notes that I wrote up from a talk that I gave at the National Academies Forum on Cyber Resilience . You can tell that it was in Washington, DC because of the “cyber”.
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NIST is No Longer Recommending Two-Factor Authentication Using SMS
NIST is no longer recommending two-factor authentication systems that use SMS, because of their many insecurities. In the latest draft of its Digital Authentication Guideline, there’s the line: [Out of band verification] using SMS is deprecated, and will no longer be allowed in future releases of this guidance.
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The MIT License, Line by Line
171 words every programmer should understand
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How Dropbox hacks your mac
Update: also see Discovering how Dropbox hacks your mac If you have Dropbox installed, take a look at System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Accessibility tab (see …
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I'm giving up on PGP
After years of wrestling GnuPG with varying levels of enthusiasm, I came to the conclusion that it’s just not worth it, and I’m giving up. At least on the concept of long term PGP keys.
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The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fields
Back in the day when the British had a penchant for conquering the world, they ran into a little problem on the subcontinent; cobras. Turns out there were a hell of a lot of the buggers wandering around India and it also turned out that they were rather venomous which
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The Democratization of Censorship
John Gilmore , an American entrepreneur and civil libertarian, once famously quipped that “the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” This notion undoubtedly rings true for those who see national governments as the principal threats to free speech.
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What Is the Secure Enclave?
The big tech news this week is that the FBI is trying to force Apple to unlock a suspect's iPhone. One of the interesting points around this story is that the iPhone in question is an older one, an iPhone 5c. Newer phones have what Apple calls the Secure Enclave, which some say protects against requests of this…
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Attack of the Week: Apple iMessage
Today’s Washington Post has a story entitled “Johns Hopkins researchers poke a hole in Apple’s encryption”, which describes the results of some research my students and I have bee…
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Amazon's customer service backdoor
As a security conscious user who follows the best practices like: using unique passwords, 2FA, only using a secure computer and being able…
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How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac
Update: Dropbox hack blocked by Apple in Sierra Following my post revealing Dropbox’s Dirty Little Security Hack a few weeks ago, I thought I’d look deeper into how Dropbox was getti…
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Follow the money: Apple vs. the FBI
A lot of people are watching the spectacle of Apple vs. the FBI and the Homeland Security Theatre and rubbing their eyes, wondering why Apple (in the person of CEO Tim Cook) is suddenly the knight in shining armour on the side of consumer privacy and civil rights. Apple, after all, is a goliath-sized corporate…
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FBI Harassment
Obligatory Disclaimer: Personal or political views presented within this post absolutely do not reflect those of my employer(s), client(s), and/or legal counsel.
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To Know If the Election Was Hacked, Look at the Ballots
You may have read at NYMag that I’ve been in discussions with the Clinton campaign about whether it might wish to seek recounts in critical…