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Security & Privacy

The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 4,335 posts.

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3544

A New Development for Coverity and Heartbleed

Byte swapping does not necessarily imply the data comes from an external source. For example, when writing graphics code, you sometimes need to do byte swapping if you’re converting between 24-bit RGB and BGR image formats (Windows’ GDI famously uses BGR so this is one place where you need to do such conversions)…

3551

Twitter Bots Use Likes, RTs for Intimidation

I awoke this morning to find my account on Twitter ( @briankrebs ) had attracted almost 12,000 new followers overnight. Then I noticed I’d gained almost as many followers as the number of re-tweets (RTs) earned for a tweet I published on Tuesday . The tweet stated how every time I tweet something related to Russian…

3554

No, RSA Is Not Broken

I have been seeing this paper by cryptographer Peter Schnorr making the rounds: “Fast Factoring Integers by SVP Algorithms.” It describes a new factoring method, and its abstract ends with the provocative sentence: “This destroys the RSA cryptosystem.” It does not. At best, it’s an improvement in factoring—and I’m not…

3556

CVE 2025 31200

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…

3558

The 'Fly' Has Been Swatted

A Ukrainian man who claimed responsibility for organizing a campaign to send heroin to my home last summer has been arrested in Italy on suspicion of trafficking in stolen credit card accounts, among other things, KrebsOnSecurity.com has learned.

3561

High-Throughput, Formal-Methods-Assisted Fuzzing for LLVM

Mutation-based fuzzing is based on the idea that new, bug-triggering inputs can often be created by randomly modifying existing, non-bug-triggering inputs. For example, if we wanted to find bugs in a PDF reader, we could grab a bunch of PDF files off the web, mutate them by flipping a few bits or something, and feed…

3568

Firewalling your code

When writing code, you can call any function as long as it’s public, and similarly, you can access any object’s public properties or methods. Usually, access to code is all or none – a piece of code can be either public or private. Lately, I’ve been thinking about ways to implement more fine-grained access controls…

3570

Mozilla says it's finally done with Onerep

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…