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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,335 posts.
2702
Xerox Alto zero-day: cracking disk password protection on a 45 year old system
We've been archiving a bunch of old Xerox Alto disk packs from the 1970s. A few of them turned out to be password-protected, so I needed ...
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The ‘app’ you can’t trash: how SIP is broken in High Sierra
When you can’t remove an app which you installed just a few minutes ago, you know there’s something wrong. Here’s the solution, and why this is bad security.
2705
Serious Intel CPU bugs (2016)
2015 was a pretty good year for Intel. Their quarterly earnings reports exceeded expectations every quarter. They continue to be the only game in town for the serious server market, which continues to grow exponentially; from the earnings reports of the two largest cloud vendors, we can see that AWS and Azure grew by…
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Zero-Width Characters: Invisibly fingerprinting text
In early 2016 I realized that it was possible to use zero-width characters, like zero-width non-joiner or other zero-width characters like the zero-width space to fingerprint text. Even with just a single type of zero-width character the presence or non-presence of the non-visible character is enough bits to…
2709
IOHIDeous OS X Local Kernel Vulnerability
Siguza’s Blog
2710
Call of Duty gaming community points to ‘swatting’ in Wichita police shooting
A 28-year-old Kansas man was shot and killed by police officers on the evening of Dec. 28 after someone fraudulently reported a hostage situation ongoing at his home. The false report was the latest in a dangerous hoax known as “ swatting ,” wherein the perpetrator falsely reports a dangerous situation at an address…
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Cracking Encrypted PDFs
I performed a brute-force attack on the password of an encrypted PDF and a brute-force attack on the key of (another) encrypted PDF, both PDFs are part of a challenge published by John August. The …
2713
The scrypt parameters
The recommended scrypt parameters in the Go docs were recently brought up for discussion given they haven’t changed since 2009.
2714
LastPass’ Authenticator app is not secure
An easy, root-free way to bypass fingerprint protection on LastPass’ authenticator app
2715
Hardening C/C++ Programs – Executable-Space Protection and ASLR
In the first part of this series we discussed the mechanics of an exploit, the general concept of hardening, and the stack protector hardening technique in particular. Some of the concepts explained there will be
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Formal Verification: The Gap Between Perfect Code and Reality
Thanks to Vlad Brown and Drawings Team for Russian and Uzbek translations. In Fall 2017, I took MIT’s 6.826, Principles of Computer Systems, taught by Turing Award-winner Butler Lampson, Nickolai Z
2718
The strange story of “Extended Random”
Yesterday, David Benjamin posted a pretty esoteric note on the IETF’s TLS mailing list. At a superficial level, the post describes some seizure-inducingly boring flaws in older Canon printers…
2719
Netstat without netstat
Recently I was doing an assessment in a locked down and restricted environment. One of the first actions you tend to do when landing a shell on a [linux] box is to do some reconnaissance. This is both on host and network, as you want to determine what new access this host has given you. Normally you would run netstat…
2720
Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains
Firefox Quantum - version 57 - introduced number of changes to the network requests scheduler. One of them is using data of the Tracking Protection database to delay load of scripts from tracking domains when possible during the time a page is actively loading and rendering - I call it tailing. This has a positive […]
2721
Unravelling Konami's Arcade DRM
It’s well known that Konami doesn’t have complex protection on its arcade systems. Programmed World was a fan-made network replacement and update service for Konami arcade games with no support outside of Japan. Nothing of its scale and quality had been seen before, and nothing has been seen since, despite other…
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HTTPS on Your Landing Page Is Important
Occasionally, I feel like I'm just handing an organisation more shovels - "here, keep digging, I'm sure this'll work out just fine..." The latest such event was with NatWest [http://personal.natwest.com] (a bank in the UK), and it culminated with this tweet from them: > I'm
2725
How to break a Captcha system in 15 minutes with Machine Learning
Let’s hack the world’s most popular Wordpress CAPTCHA Plug-in
2726
TP-Link firmware sends six DNS requests and one NTP query every 5 seconds
A design flaw in TP-Link Wi-Fi repeater firmware causes it to waste an excessive amount of bandwidth on NTP timekeeping. DDoS’ed public NTP servers in the process.
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Decoding an air conditioner control's checksum with differential cryptanalysis
Back in 2009 I wrote an Arduino library ( IRRemote ) to encode and decode infrared signals for remote controls. I got an email recently fr...
2730
The Trouble with Politicians Sharing Passwords
Yesterday I had a bunch of people point me at a tweet from a politician in the UK named Nadine Dorries [https://twitter.com/NadineDorries]. As it turns out, some folks were rather alarmed about her position on sharing what we would normally consider to be a secret. In this