Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,337 posts.

Security & Privacy
Any year
4174

WhatsApp Security Vulnerability

Back in March, Rolf Weber wrote about a potential vulnerability in the WhatsApp protocol that would allow Facebook to defeat perfect forward secrecy by forcibly change users’ keys, allowing it—or more likely, the government—to eavesdrop on encrypted messages. It seems that this vulnerability is real: WhatsApp has the…

4182

; Echo “Shell Injection”

This is an introductory article about shell injection, a security vulnerability allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the user's machine. This is a well-studied problem, and there are simple and efficient solutions to it. It's relatively easy to design library API in such a way as to shield the application…

4189

Reversing a MacOS Kernel Extension

In my last post I covered the basics of kernel debugging in macOS. In this post we will put some of that to use and work through the process of reversing a macOS kernel module. As I said in my last post, in macOS there is a kernel module named “Don’t Steal Mac OS X” (DSMOS) which registers a function with the Mach-O…

4196

Passkeys

This is an opinionated, “quick-start” guide to using passkeys as a web developer. It’s hopefully broadly applicable, but one size will never fit all authentication needs and this guide ignores everything that’s optional. So take it as a worked example, but not as gospel.

4198

Beginners Guide to 0day/CVE AppSec Research

A while ago I took up the challenge to get Offensive Security Web Expert (OSWE) certified. During this journey I learned many awesome things. The most important lesson learned was that with source code and a debugger, I could find vulnerabilities exponentially faster than by using traditional Blackbox/Bug-Bounty…

4200

Keyringless GnuPG

My favorite music player is Audacious . It follows the Winamp Classic tradition of not trying to manage my music library. Instead it waits patiently for me to throw files and directories at it. These selections will be informally grouped into transient, disposable playlists of whatever I fancy that day.