New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,335 posts.
Further hardening glibc malloc() against single byte overflows
Introduction Back in 2014, while at Project Zero, I exploited a buffer overflow of a single NUL byte in glibc . Tavis Ormandy had found th...
Don't tell people to turn off Windows Update
You know what really surprised me about this whole WannaCry ransomware problem [https://www.troyhunt.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-wannacrypt-ransomware/]? No, not how quickly it spread. Not the breadth of organisations it took offline either and no, not even that so many of them hadn'
Microsoft Issues WanaCrypt Patch for Windows 8, XP
Microsoft Corp. today took the unusual step of issuing security updates to address flaws in older, unsupported versions of Windows — including Windows XP and Windows 8 . The move is a bid to slow the spread of the WanaCrypt ransomware strain that infected tens of thousands of Windows computers virtually overnight this…
Patching Is Hard
There are many news reports of a ransomware worm . Much of the National Health Service in the UK has been hit; so has FedEx . The patch for the flaw exploited by this malware has been out for a while, but many companies haven’t installed it. Naturally, this has prompted a lot of victim-blaming: they should have…
Things to Use Instead of JSON Web Tokens
You might have heard that you shouldn't be using JWT. That advice is correct - you really shouldn't use it. In general, specifications that allow the attacker to choose the algorithm for negotiation have more problems than ones that don't (see TLS). N libraries need to implement M different encryption and decryption…
Why Is the TSA Scanning Paper?
I’ve been reading a bunch of anecdotal reports that the TSA is starting to scan paper separately: A passenger going through security at Kansas City International Airport (MCI) recently was asked by security officers to remove all paper products from his bag. Everything from books to Post-It Notes, documents and more…
Password reuse and credential stuffing
The short version: I'm loading over 1 billion breached accounts into HIBP. These are from 2 different "combo lists", collections of email addresses and passwords from all sorts of different locations. I've verified their accuracy (including my own record in one of them) and many hundreds of millions
Something is wrong when the ‘telephone app’ on your phone becomes 3rd party
Since I am not living in my home country, I frequently use two different SIM cards and prefer having a phone with dual-sim support. This limits your choice s...
Why Security Backdoors are Bad (2016)
Recently, there has been a bit of controversy over the concept of the government or security agencies adding backdoors to services and…
Stupid security things
My mate Lars Klint shared this tweet the other day: > Your password is not unique. pic.twitter.com/ga4GwxtzrQ [https://t.co/ga4GwxtzrQ] — Lars Klint (@larsklint) April 16, 2017 [https://twitter.com/larsklint/status/853507749488975873] Naturally, I passed it on [https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/853517036131041280]…
An analysis of the Nomx secure communications device
With slick marketing, catchy taglines and some pretty bold claims about their security, nomx claim to have cracked email security. Let's see if they have.
Golang SSH Redux
I’ll cover the post/blog, and then I’d like to counter some misconceptions. While part of me thinks “I must’ve been very unclear to have so many people misunderstand”, I also saw how many people commented without bothering to read, so really there’s a limit to how much self-flagellation will happen.
Unroll.me
Link to: http://blog.unroll.me/we-can-do-better/
Tales of SugarCRM Security Horrors
This is the personal website of Egidio Romano, a very curious guy from Sicily, Italy. He's a computer security enthusiast, particularly addicted to webapp security.
What Happens When You Send a Zero-Day to a Bank?
THIS POST MOVED TO MY NEW BLOG AT https://blog.phor.net/how-to-zero-day-a-bank
Phishing with Unicode Domains
Vulnerability in Chrome, Firefox, and Opera makes users susceptible to phishing with Unicode domains
Golang SSH Security
Working on a project for a client recently, I needed to speak the SSH protocol in Golang code. So I started with the x/crypto/ssh package, part of the suite of libraries from the Golang developers which is not part of the standard library and not part of their usual compatibility guarantees, but more along the lines…
ShadowBrokers: The NSA Compromised the SWIFT Network
This is by far, the most interesting release from Shadow Brokers as it does not only contain tools — but also materials describing the most…
Debugging macOS Kernel Using VirtualBox
Update: In the HN discussion, awalton mentioned you can set CPUID flags in VMWare. Simply adding cpuid.7.ebx = "-----------0--------------------" to the vmx file will disable SMAP. Late last year, I upgraded my old MBP to the 2016 model with a Skylake processor. As I was debugging a kernel exploit, it turned out that…
Remote code execution affecting most iOS/macOS apps
CVE-2017-2416 Remote code execution triggered by malformed GIF in ImageIO framework, affecting most iOS/macOS apps ImageIO Available for: iPhone 5 and later, iPad 4th generation and later, iPod tou…