Most cited

Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,584 posts.

Security & Privacy
Any year
37

Firefox and Chromium

Firefox is sometimes recommended as a supposedly more secure browser because of its parent company's privacy practices. This article explains why this notion is not true and enumerates a number of security weaknesses in Firefox's security model when compared to Chromium. In particular, it covers the less granular…

41

The Trouble with Tor

The Tor Project makes a browser that allows anyone to surf the Internet anonymously. Tor stands for "the onion router" and that describes how the service works. Traffic is routed through a number of relays where each relay only knows the next hop, not the ultimate destination.

43

Write Down Your Password

Microsoft’s Jesper Johansson urged people to write down their passwords. This is good advice, and I’ve been saying it for years. Simply, people can no longer remember passwords good enough to reliably defend against dictionary attacks, and are much more secure if they choose a password too complicated to remember and…

46

Web Cryptography API posted as W3C working draft

This specification describes a JavaScript API for performing basic cryptographic operations in web applications, such as hashing, signature generation and verification, and encryption and decryption. Additionally, it describes an API for applications to generate and/or manage the keying material necessary to perform…

47

The qmail security guarantee

Of course, ``security hole in qmail'' does not include problems outside of qmail: for example, NFS security problems, TCP/IP security problems, DNS security problems, bugs in scripts run from .forward files, and operating system bugs generally. It's silly to blame a problem on qmail if the system was already…

57

Reflections: The ecosystem is moving

At Open Whisper Systems, we’ve been developing open source “consumer-facing” software for the past four years. We want to share some of the things we’ve learned while doing it. As a software developer, I envy writers, musicians, and filmmakers. Unlike software, when they create something, it is...

58

Entropy Attacks

The conventional wisdom is that hashing more entropy sources can't hurt: if H is any modern cryptographic hash function then H(x,y,z) is at least as good a random number as H(x,y), no matter how awful z is. So we pile one source on top of another, hashing them all together and hoping that at least one of them is good.