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The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 4,440 posts.

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1988

Let's Encrypt Root and Intermediate Certificates

The keys and certificates that will underlie Let’s Encrypt have been generated. This was done during a key ceremony at a secure facility today. The following objects were created: Key pair and self-signed cert for the ISRG root Key pair and certificate for the ISRG root’s OCSP Key pairs and certificates for two Let’s…

1994

Preparing to Issue 200M Certificates in 24 Hours

On a normal day Let’s Encrypt issues nearly two million certificates. When we think about what essential infrastructure for the Internet needs to be prepared for though, we’re not thinking about normal days. We want to be prepared to respond as best we can to the most difficult situations that might arise. In some of…

1997

Simple Encrypted Arithmetic Library goes open source

Today we are extremely excited to announce that our Microsoft Simple Encrypted Arithmetic Library (Microsoft SEAL), an easy-to-use homomorphic encryption library developed by researchers in the Cryptography Research group at Microsoft, is open source on GitHub under an MIT License for free use. The library has already…

1999

Elliptic Curve Cryptography: A Basic Introduction

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is a modern public-key encryption technique famous for being smaller, faster, and more efficient than incumbents. Bitcoin, for example, uses ECC as its asymmetric cryptosystem because it is so lightweight. The mathematical entity that makes all of this possible is the elliptic curve…

2000

New Pegasus spyware abuses identified in Mexico

Mexican digital rights organization R3D, with technical support from the Citizen Lab, has determined that Mexican journalists and a human rights defender were infected with Pegasus between 2019 and 2021. The infections occurred years after the first revelations of Pegasus abuses in Mexico, and after Mexico’s current…

2001

Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

The Open Source Technology Improvement Fund is proud to share the results of our security audit of Ruby on Rails . Ruby on Rails (or “Rails”) is an open source full stack web-application framework. Thanks to the help of X41 D-Sec , GitLab , and the Sovereign Tech Agency , Rails can provide more secure versions of the…

2009

A Survival Guide for the Small Mail Server

Nowadays many companies and organizations (non-profits, units of governmental and educational institutions, etc) believe that running their own mail servers has become an impossible task, due both to the large amount of inbound spam and to the continuous attempts by spammers to send outbound spam through their mail…