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The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 371 posts.
When applying for a job at McDonald's, over 90% of franchises use "Olivia," an AI-powered chatbot. We discovered a vulnerability that could allow an attacker to access more than 64 million job applications. This data includes applicants' names, resumes, email addresses, phone numbers, and personality test results.
When I first learned about Diffie-Hellman and especially elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman, I had one rather obvious question: Why elliptic curves? Why use this strange group that seems rather arbitrar…
A walk through of building an image that displays its own MD5 Hash
“A good programmer is someone who looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.” – Doug Linder
Update 6/10: Based on a short conversation with an engineering lead at X, some of the devices used at X are claimed to be using HSMs. See more further below. Matthew Garrett has a nice post about T…
My standard "everyday" solution when it comes to connecting computers into a single network is Wireguard. Wireguard is good, supports p2p, and generally has no downsides.
This means that I am oblivious to all of my friends’ fun broadcasted on Instagram. I don’t feel pressured either to update the abstract audience of everyone I ever connected with online, on where I am, what I am doing or who I am hanging out with.
This post is about an important, but also scary, prompt injection discovery that leads to full system compromise of the developer’s machine in GitHub …
I recently lost my Facebook account for two months, and was significantly cut off from certain aspects of society during that time. This is the dark side of account bans.
imessage-exporter ’s goal is to provide the most comprehensive representation of iMessage data available. Message data is stored in a legacy format that appears to be a stream that represents objects.
Browsers have always been an arena for fighting and flaming over why your browser is the best and has the most features, while all others are inferior and un...
It has been a really long time since I last wrote something here as life happens, things get busier, etc etc. I am now trying to get back into writing things down and here we go! So, imagine a tool or a service that allows you to run some arbitrary code via a shell. Either through a ssh or more commonly, via a web…
Background On April 16, 2025, Apple released a patch for a bug in CoreAudio which they said was “Actively exploited in the wild.” This flew under the radar a bit. Epsilon’s blog has a great writeup of the other bug that was presumably exploited in this chain: a bug in RPAC. The only thing out there that I am aware of…
Some people who had previously disabled Apple Intelligence in macOS 15.3 and iOS 18.3 saw it re-enabled after updating to macOS 15.3.1 and iOS 18.3.1 today. In fact I personally have two different Apple silicon Macs running macOS Sequoia, and after I updated both Macs to 15.3.1, Apple Intelligence was re-enabled on my…
In March 2024, Mozilla said it was winding down its collaboration with Onerep — an identity protection service offered with the Firefox web browser that promises to remove users from hundreds of people-search sites — after KrebsOnSecurity revealed Onerep’s founder had created dozens of people-search services and was…
A few years ago when I was into reverse engineering and binary analysis (and game modding), I did a lot of research into anticheats work. I was curious about tracking their updates, since that would allow me to:
New directive targets “anti-Christian,” “anti-American,” and “anti-capitalism” opinions
I maintain a sorta-popular open source package, and I want to prevent big corporations and "bad guys" from using it. I want feedback on how to do this.
In the battle between the Online Safety Act and GDPR, who will win? FIGHT! I'll start by saying that I'm moderately positive on Online Safety. If services don't want to provide moderation then they shouldn't let their younger users be exposed to harm. The social network BlueSky has taken a pragmatic approach to this…
1.0 The Silicon Root of Trust: Pre-Boot & Hardware Primitives The security of the macOS platform on Apple Silicon is not defined by the kernel; it is d...
On the completely impossible situation of blocking the Tor .onion TLD to avoid leaks, but at the same time not block it to make users able to do what they want. dot-onion leaks The onion TLD is a Tor specific domain that does not mean much to the world outside of Tor. If you try … Continue reading Leeks and leaks →
The discovery of a backdoor in XZ Utils in the spring of 2024 shocked the open source community, raising critical questions about software supply chain security. This post explores whether better Debian packaging practices could have detected this threat, offering a guide to auditing packages and suggesting future…
You know when you're really jet lagged and really tired and the cogs in your head are just moving that little bit too slow? That's me right now, and the penny has just dropped that a Mailchimp phish has grabbed my credentials, logged into my account and exported
Cryptographic schemes are based on the computational difficulty of solving some ‘hard’ problem. For example, RSA (specifically, RSA-2048) is based on the difficulty of a problem like this:
An auth scheme where you let yourself in.
I've always attributed slow Xcode launches to Xcode simply sucking, but I've noticed that the FileMerge app frequently launches slowly too. When this happens, the app can take a dozen bounces in the Dock before finally opening. FileMerge resides in the folder Xcode.app/Contents/Applications/ within the Xcode bundle…
LLM and AI companies seem to all be in a race to breathe the last breath of air in every room they stumble into. This practice started with larger websites, ones that already had protection from ma...
This opinion is a routine ruling over TOS formation and whether disputes must go to arbitration. However, before I dig into that question, I need to note the case’s chilling implications. * * * This case involves the Adult Friend...
