Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 850 posts.

Crypto & Blockchain
Any year
825

EFF now accepting Bitcoin again

Today, we’re happy to announce that we will be accepting Bitcoin donations through our website. You can use them to make one-time donations, set up monthly donations or get an EFF membership (which includes awesome membership swag like EFF hats and digital freedom t-shirts).While we are accepting...

839

Bcrypt is now obsolete

I am speaking today at BSDCan'09 about my work on the scrypt key derivation function. In the context of hardware brute-force attacks, scrypt is thousands of times more secure than existing "best practice" solutions such as bcrypt and PBKDF2; in fact, under reasonable assumptions it is provably as strong as possible…

840

Encrypt-then-MAC

First things first: Why use a composition of encryption and MAC instead of a single primitive which achieves both? Because people are very good at writing bad code. In my experience on the FreeBSD security team, writing dozens of security advisories, there are three types of code which are especially prone to have…