Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,772 posts.

Security & Privacy
Any year
7023

Very Good Security

“Never answer an anonymous letter” —Yogi Berra Did you ever wonder why doctor offices ask for your social security number? They don’t want to keep your SSN, but it’s the primary “key” that identifies you to an insurance company. In computer science/math terms, they need to call a function. Let’s call it: int…

7030

I'm giving up on HPKP

HTTP Public Key Pinning is a very powerful standard that allows a host to instruct a browser to only accept certain public keys when communicating with it for a given period of time. Whilst HPKP can offer a lot of protection, it can also cause a lot of harm too.

7037

The NSA is not made of magic (2014)

I am regularly asked what is the most surprising thing about the Snowden NSA documents. It’s this: the NSA is not made of magic. Its tools are no different from what we have in our world, it’s just better-funded. X-KEYSCORE is Bro plus memory. FOXACID is Metasploit with a budget. QUANTUM is AirPwn with a seriously…

7044

Implant.ARM.iLOBleed.a

HP servers provide a management module called iLO (a.k.a. Integrated Lights-Out), which turns on as soon as the power cable is connected, loading a full-blown proprietary operating system. This module has full access to all the firmware, hardware, software, and operating system installed on the server. In addition to…

7046

Sinkholed: A DNS Horror Story (2019)

On 26 Nov 2019 at 14:55 UTC, I logged into my server that hosts my website to perform a simple maintenance activity. Merely three minutes later, at 14:58 UTC, the domain name susam.in used to host this website was transferred to another registrant without any authorisation by me or without any notification sent to me…