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Security & Privacy
The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 240 posts.
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Xerox Alto zero-day: cracking disk password protection on a 45 year old system
We've been archiving a bunch of old Xerox Alto disk packs from the 1970s. A few of them turned out to be password-protected, so I needed ...
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Breaking the Ledger Security Model
In this post, I’m going to discuss a vulnerability I discovered in Ledger hardware wallets. The vulnerability arose due to Ledger’s use of a custom architecture to work around many of the limitations of their Secure Element.
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Hash-based Signatures: An illustrated Primer
Over the past several years I’ve been privileged to observe two contradictory and fascinating trends. The first is that we’re finally starting to use the cryptography that researchers h…
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Meltdown Initial Performance Regressions
KPTI/KAISER Meltdown Initial Performance Regressions
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Keybase’s browser extension subverts its encryption
The Keybase browser extension subverts the app's end-to-end encryption. Keybase considers that "an acceptable risk" and not worth fixing.
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Attacking Merkle Trees with a second preimage attack
Hacking, hardware, software, and general curiosities of computing machinery! Docendo discumus.
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Meltdown and Spectre Linux Kernel Status
I keep getting a lot of private emails about my previous post about the latest status of the Linux kernel patches to resolve both the Meltdown and …
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GitHub shouldn't allow username reuse
Update 2018-04-19 - GitHub has implemented some rules around retiring "namespaces".
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Apple in China: who holds the keys?
Last week Apple made an announcement describing changes to the iCloud service for users residing in mainland China. Beginning on February 28th, all users who have specified China as their country/r…
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Major sites running unauthenticated JavaScript on their payment pages
A few months ago, British Airways' customers had their credit card details stolen. How was this possible? The best guess goes something like this: BA had 3rd party JS on its payment page <script src="https://example.com/whatever.js"></script> The 3rd party's site was hacked, and the JS was changed. BA's customers ran…
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Why [Insert Thing Here] Is Not a Password Killer
These days, I get a lot of messages from people on security related things. Often it's related to data breaches or sloppy behaviour on behalf of some online service playing fast and loose with HTTPS or passwords or some other easily observable security posture. But on a fairly regular
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Shamir’s Secret Sharing Scheme
Consider a scenario in which you are tasked with managing the security of a bank's vault. The vault is considered impenetrable without a key, which you are g...
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Why Intel will never let owners control the ME
The Intel Management Engine is an auxillary microprocessor embedded into modern Intel x86 CPUs or chipsets. 1 It runs an Intel-signed proprietary binary blob. Due to code signing restrictions enforced by the hardware, it cannot be modified or replaced by the user. (AMD x86 CPUs have a similar auxillary microprocessor…
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Money Laundering via Author Impersonation on Amazon
Patrick Reames had no idea why Amazon.com sent him a 1099 form saying he’d made almost $24,000 selling books via Createspace , the company’s on-demand publishing arm. That is, until he searched the site for his name and discovered someone has been using it to peddle a $555 book that’s full of nothing but gibberish.
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Advanced web security topics
(Updated 22 May 2020) This post discusses web security issues that I come across – so far thankfully mostly by reading about them. It is a work in progress which I’ll keep updating. The…
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Secret Service Warns of Chip Card Scheme
The U.S. Secret Service is warning financial institutions about a new scam involving the temporary theft of chip-based debit cards issued to large corporations. In this scheme, the fraudsters intercept new debit cards in the mail and replace the chips on the cards with chips from old cards. When the unsuspecting…
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A Beginner's Guide to Firewalling with pf
This guide is written for the person very new to firewalling. Please realize that the sample firewall we build should not be considered appropriate for actual use. I just try to cover a few basics, that took me awhile to grasp from the better known (and more detailed) documentation referenced below
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Voice Phishing Scams Are Getting More Clever
Most of us have been trained to be wary of clicking on links and attachments that arrive in emails unexpected, but it’s easy to forget scam artists are constantly dreaming up innovations that put a new shine on old-fashioned telephone-based phishing scams. Think you’re too smart to fall for one? Think again: Even…
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Some thoughts on Spectre and Meltdown
The story of these attacks starts in late 2004. I had submitted my doctoral thesis and had a few months before flying back to Oxford for my defense, so I turned to some light reading: Intel's latest "Optimization Manual", full of tips on how to write faster code. (Eking out every last nanosecond of performance has…
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2,800 New Data Breaches with 80M Records Added
tl;dr - a collection of nearly 3k alleged data breaches has appeared with a bunch of data already proven legitimate from previous incidents, but also tens of millions of addresses that haven't been seen in HIBP before. Those 80M records are now searchable, read on for the full story:
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How to dismantle a compiler bomb
You have heard of “zip bombs” (a tiny ZIP file that decompresses to multiple gigabytes) and “XML bombs” (small XML file abusing the entities to consume lots of memory), and …
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Spectre/Meltdown Pits Transparency Against Liability
There is a lot of righteous anger directed toward Intel over CPU bugs that were revealed by Spectre/Meltdown. I agree that things could have been handled better, particularly with regards to transparency and the sharing of information among the relevant user communities that could have worked together to deploy…
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Maximizing password manager attack surface
Kaspersky Password Manager uses a unique approach to maximize the attack surface. A quick introduction.