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Security & Privacy

The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 4,337 posts.

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3846

Daring Fireball: Cookies and Privacy

What I detect in Google’s behavior (and John Battelle’s more-or-less defense of it) is a sense of entitlement. That because in the past ad networks could track almost all users via cookies, they are entitled to continue tracking almost all users across the web via cookies, even when a large (and growing) number of…

3851

Who can I hire to hack me?

I use a password manager. I have 2FA set up on everything. When an organisation asks me to set a recovery question, I generate a 32 character passphrase. I don't use my mother's maiden name or my first pet's birthday on anything sensitive. I monitor my email addresses for breaches, and I regularly check my credit…

3854

USPS ‘Informed Delivery’ Is Stalker’s Dream

A free new service from the U.S. Postal Service that provides scanned images of incoming mail before it is slated to arrive at its destination address is raising eyebrows among security experts who worry about the service’s potential for misuse by private investigators, identity thieves, stalkers or abusive…

3855

Teensy weensy crypto

As the UK's politicians continue to fail to understand what "strong cryptography" or "banning" even mean, I thought I would have a look at how simple strong cryptography can be.

3858

Escaping privileged containers for fun

Despite the fact that it is not a 'real' vulnerability, escaping privileged Docker containers is nevertheless pretty funny. And because there will always be people who will come up with reasons or excuses to run a privileged container (even though you really shouldn't), this could really be handy at some point in the…

3863

Exploiting a Go Binary

Earlier this year, tylerni7 showed us a proof of concept for a 32 bit Go exploit using this issue . geohot and I had a wager over who could get the first remote code execution on play.golang.org : he won, but just barely ;-). Props also to ricky for helping to find the underlying cause/writing the patch. Here is a…

3865

RSA: Theory and Implementation

RSA has been a staple of public key cryptography for over 40 years, and is still being used today for some tasks in the newest TLS 1.3 standard. This post describes the theory behind RSA - the math that makes it work, as well as some practical considerations; it also presents a complete implementation of RSA key…