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Security & Privacy

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

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3941

How to Block Stingray Devices

Disable 2G On Android To Block Stingray Devices 1) Pull up the phone dialer and dial *#*#4636#*#* (that spells INFO) 2) This brings you to the testing screen, select "Phone/Device information". 3) Scroll down a little to "preferred network type", select the arrow. 4) Change it to LTE/WCDMA Only. It…

3943

Cracking random number generators (xoroshiro128+)

In software, we generate random numbers by calling a function called a "random number generator". Such functions have hidden states, so that repeated calls to the function generate new numbers that appear random. If you know this state, you can predict all future outcomes of the random number generators. O'Neill, a…

3945

Is Unicode Safe?

Unicode is just too complex to ever be secure.  — Bruce Schneier, 2000 Over the last 25 years Unicode has succeeded. It hasn't displaced all other character encodings, but it's clearly on its way there. It's supported widely enough that it's a compatible choice, new projects use it, and it's becoming the…

3948

Cell Phone OPSEC for Border Crossings

I have heard stories of more aggressive interrogation of electronic devices at US border crossings. I know a lot about securing computers, but very little about securing phones. Are there easy ways to delete data—files, photos, etc.—on phones so it can’t be recovered? Does resetting a phone to factory defaults erase…

3951

Schneier: The Value of Privacy

Last week, revelation of yet another NSA surveillance effort against the American people has rekindled the privacy debate. Those in favor of these programs have trotted out the same rhetorical question we hear every time privacy advocates oppose ID checks, video cameras, massive databases, data mining, and other…

3956

Anomalous keys in Tor relays

Counting almost 7,000 relays , the Tor network is one of the largest volunteer-run anonymity networks operating today. Most of the volunteers who operate these relays choose to remain anonymous, and little is known about how they set up or operate their relays. As a result, it is not clear if all relays correctly…

3957

1971 Social Engineering Attack

From Betty Medsger’s book on the 1971 FBI burglary (page 22): As burglars, they used some unusual techniques, ones Davidon enjoyed recalling years later, such as what some of them did in 1970 at a draft board office in Delaware. During their casing, they had noticed that the interior door that opened to the draft…

3959

Beware of strncpy and strncat

Most C programmers also know to avoid the legacy strcpy() and strcat() functions, as these commonly introduce buffer-overflow problems. Instead, C programmers should use the newer strncpy() and strncat() functions, which check the size of the buffer they're copying data into.