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Security & Privacy
The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 113 posts.
Iran forged the wrong SSL certificate
If you want to be really evil, however, *.google.com is the wrong SSL certificate to forge. The right one? ssl.google-analytics.com .
I Can Crack Your App With Just A Shell (And How To Stop Me)
Hi, I'm Kenneth. I’m a Swiss transplant in San Francisco. I’m an angel investor, and an engineer at AngelList & CSC. Previously, I was co-founder of FreshPay and the architect behind Chartboost. When I'm not working, you can find me either photographing some remote corner of the world, or hacking away on an…
Tarsnap critical security bug
There's a lot to say about this, and it's entirely possible that I'll miss covering some important points in this post; if I've missed something, please email me or post a comment below and I'll do my best to add the necessary information.
Most laser printer printed pages have tracking watermark
<br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><a href="http://brahmsyellowdots.blogspot.com/2008/10/it-begins.html">About This Blog</a>
A little game to demonstrate timing attacks.
Lauren Ipsum is trying to get past Jane Hecate, a little old lady who holds the Book of Passwords. Jane is older and can't see well, so she has to spell out Lauren's guess letter by letter to check whether it's the right password. How can Lauren use this to her advantage? A story about computer science and other…
What does $1265 of bugs look like?
To start with, there's a lot of spelling mistakes — 53, by my count. Within a few hours of my announcing the bug bounties, someone had run a spell checker against all of the comments in the Tarsnap source code and found about half of these; the rest, consisting mostly of cases where one English word was replaced by…
OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure
Introduction I have had this article planned since the end of 2009 and have had it as a skeleton since then. I wanted to point out the many problems with OS X security and debunk the baseless myth …
Chrome Privacy
Dave Winer ends an otherwise quite reasonable piece about his concern at Facebook's
OpenSSL memory use in Node.js
Last Thursday I went to the Joyent office for Node Office Hours — I wanted to talk to Isaac about running a private NPM registry .
Kindle Touch jail broken via ID3 Tag
Update Kindle 5.0.3 has fixed the hole to allow for jailbreak. Upgrading an already jailbroken Kindle Touch is fine as the update does not remove the custom key to allow custom packages. If you on 5.0.3 and have not already installed the key, there is a new jailbreak.
Anonymous message to NATO
Greetings, members of NATO. We are Anonymous. In a recent publication, you have singled out Anonymous as a threat to “government and th...
Hacking Google for Fun and Profit
At the end of last year, Google announced their Vulnerability Reward Program which rewards security researchers for reported security and privacy holes in Google properties. This sounded like an interesting challenge, and I set out to find security holes. I found three, got paid, and am now in the Google Security Hall…
No Copyright Intended
On October 26, a YouTube user named crimewriter95 posted a full-length version of Pulp Fiction, rearranged in chronological order. A couple things struck me about this video. First, I’m surprised that a full-length, 2.5-hour very slight remix of a popular film can survive on YouTube for over six weeks without getting…
Projects: hijack (Hijacking the iPhone earphone jack)
Hijacking power and bandwidth from the mobile phone's audio interface. Creating a cubic-inch peripheral sensor ecosystem for the mobile phone.
A brief Sony password analysis
So the Sony saga continues. As if the whole thing about 77 million breached PlayStation Network accounts [http://www.theage.com.au/digital-life/games/playstation-privacy-breach-77-million-customer-accounts-exposed-20110427-1dvhf.html] wasn’t bad enough, numerous other security breaches…
Isaac Asimov on Security Theatre.
A great find: In his 1956 short story, “Let’s Get Together,” Isaac Asimov describes security measures proposed to counter a terrorist threat: “Consider further that this news will leak out as more and more people become involved in our countermeasures and more and more people begin to guess what we’re doing. Then…
Root access to MySQL.com sold for $3k - now serving malware
A security firm revealed today that mysql.com , the central repository for widely-used Web database software, was hacked and booby-trapped to serve visitors with malicious software. The disclosure caught my eye because just a few days ago I saw evidence that administrative access to mysql.com was being sold in the…
Schneier: The Dishonest Minority: Security and its Role in Modern Society
Three months ago, I announced that I was writing a book on why security exists in human societies. This is basically the book’s thesis statement: All complex systems contain parasites. In any system of cooperative behavior, an uncooperative strategy will be effective—and the system will tolerate the uncooperatives—as…