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Security & Privacy

The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 268 posts.

2017
35

There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use

It's common knowledge that Android device tend to be more out of date than iOS devices, but what does this actually mean? Let’s look at android marketshare data to see how old devices in the wild are. The x axis of the plot below is date, and the y axis is Android marketshare. The share of all devices sums to 100%…

42

Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

Firefox Quantum - version 57 - introduced number of changes to the network requests scheduler. One of them is using data of the Tracking Protection database to delay load of scripts from tracking domains when possible during the time a page is actively loading and rendering - I call it tailing. This has a positive […]

44

Falling through the KRACKs

The big news in crypto today is the KRACK attack on WPA2 protected WiFi networks. Discovered by Mathy Vanhoef and Frank Piessens at KU Leuven, KRACK (Key Reinstallation Attack) leverages a vulnerab…

48

Golang SSH Security

Working on a project for a client recently, I needed to speak the SSH protocol in Golang code. So I started with the x/crypto/ssh package, part of the suite of libraries from the Golang developers which is not part of the standard library and not part of their usual compatibility guarantees, but more along the lines…

50

Curl’s backdoor threat

-- "Have you ever detected anyone trying to add a backdoor to curl?" -- "Have you ever been pressured by an organization or a person to add suspicious code to curl that you wouldn't otherwise accept?" -- "If a crime syndicate would kidnap your family to force you to comply, what backdoor would you be … Continue…

51

Equihax

Trawling the darknet as one does, I came across this little simple page this morning. It claims to be the real EQUIFAX hackers, unlike the last darknet site that was soon taken down by morons. I ha…

53

DRM Is Toxic to Culture

In pursuit of market control now, deployers of DRM are robbing us of our culture in perpetuity by enclosing the future commons. It’s possible that you think that unauthorised use of copyright…

54

On Password Managers

It has come to my attention that people are Wrong On The Internet about password managers. This matters, because almost everybody should be using one. Herewith background, opinions, and a description of my own setup, which is reasonably secure.

60

Things to Use Instead of JSON Web Tokens

You might have heard that you shouldn't be using JWT. That advice is correct - you really shouldn't use it. In general, specifications that allow the attacker to choose the algorithm for negotiation have more problems than ones that don't (see TLS). N libraries need to implement M different encryption and decryption…