Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,771 posts.
Keyless SSL: The Nitty Gritty Technical Details
We announced Keyless SSL yesterday to an overwhelmingly positive response. We read through the comments on this blog, Reddit, Hacker News, and people seem interested in knowing more and getting deeper into the technical details.
Ginseng: Keeping secrets in registers when you distrust the operating system
Ginseng: keeping secrets in registers when you distrust the operating system Yun & Zhong et al., NDSS’19 Suppose you did go to the extreme length of establishing an unconditional root of …
Managed SSL for Google App Engine
We’re excited to announce the beta release of managed SSL certificates at no charge for applications built on Google App Engine . This service automatically encrypts server-to-client communication — an essential part of safeguarding sensitive information over the web. Manually managing SSL certificates to ensure a…
Hacking Oklahoma State University's Student ID
READ THIS AFTER - a full follow up here: http://snelling.io/following-up-hacking-oklahoma-state-universitys-student-id
You are being followed: The business of social media surveillance
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Introducing Heroku Private Spaces
As the world becomes more cloud-centric, and more of our apps and business depend on its capabilities, the trust, control and management of cloud services
It's Been a Year and Georgia.gov Continues to Be Hacked
Illegal drug transactions facilitated through Georgia's employee portal
Wiretapping the Internet
On Monday, The New York Times reported that President Obama will seek sweeping laws enabling law enforcement to more easily eavesdrop on the internet. Technologies are changing, the administration argues, and modern digital systems aren’t as easy to monitor as traditional telephones. The government wants to force…
Copyright troll lawsuit blows up in face of Righthaven
Righthaven is attempting to make a business out of suing Internet websites for copyright infringement. It has filed 180 copyright actions so far —without ever first asking that a work be removed from the target website—in each case alleging “willful infringement” and attempting to extract...
HTTPS in the real world
In cryptography, trust is mathematically provable. Everything else is just faith.
Using ‘radioactive data’ to detect if a data set was used for training
Facebook AI has developed a new technique to mark the images in a dataset, so that researchers can then determine if a particular machine learning model...
Reverse Engineering Yaesu FT-70D Firmware Encryption
This article dives into my full methodology for reverse engineering the tool mentioned in this article. It's a bit longer but is intended to be accessible to folks who aren't necessarily advanced reverse-engineers.
Disappointing Unsealing Decision in Aaron Swartz Case
The public lost another battle in the U.S. v. Aaron Swartz case, this one over transparency. On May 13, 2013, the U.S. District Court judge handling the prosecution sided with the government, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and JSTOR and refused to make public any information in the case...
ACLU and EFF Sue Over Warrantless Phone and Laptop Searches at U.S. Border
Lawsuit on Behalf of 11 Travelers Challenges Searches of Electronic Devices as Unconstitutional
Safari is now probably the influential wild card browser for user privacy
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Application trust is hard, but Apple does it well
On November 12, 2020 Apple released macOS Big Sur. In the hours after the release went live, somewhere in Apple's infrastructure an OCSP esponder cried out in pain…
Statistician calls for audit to address election hacking fears
Double-check needed before Electoral College cements presidential results on Dec. 19
Protect your privacy and your phone number with Firefox Relay
When you share your personal phone number with anyone outside your circle of family and friends, it essentially gives them permission to call you anytime o
Don't Roll Your Own
This is going to be a rant about modern web design practices. But before I get to that, let me begin with a familiar principle from the world of cryptography. Among software developers, and especially among those who work on security-sensitive systems, there is a well-known maxim: Don't roll your own crypto. This does…
ICEBlock handled my vulnerability report in the worst possible way
Last week, I wrote about how Joshua Aaron's ICEBlock app, which allows people to anonymously report ICE sightings within a 5-mile radius, is – unfortunately, and despite apparent good intentions – activism theater. This was based on Joshua's talk at HOPE where he made it clear that he isn'
CVE-2026-3888: Important Snap Flaw Enables Local Privilege Escalation to Root
The Qualys Threat Research Unit has identified a Local Privilege Escalation (LPE) vulnerability affecting default installations of Ubuntu Desktop version 24.04 and later. This flaw (CVE-2026-3888)…
The sorry state of OpenSSL usability (2017)
OpenSSL's inadequate documentation, confusing key formats, and deprecated interfaces make it difficult to use, despite its importance.
Snowden's Dead Man's Switch
Edward Snowden has set up a dead man’s switch. He’s distributed encrypted copies of his document trove to various people, and has set up some sort of automatic system to distribute the key, should something happen to him. Dead man’s switches have a long history, both for safety (the machinery automatically stops if…