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Security & Privacy
The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 268 posts.
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The CIA's “Development Tradecraft Do's and Dont's”
Useful best practices for malware writers, courtesy of the CIA. Seems like a lot of good advice. General: DO obfuscate or encrypt all strings and configuration data that directly relate to tool functionality. Consideration should be made to also only de-obfuscating strings in-memory at the moment the data is needed…
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Security Keys
Security Keys are (generally) USB-connected hardware fobs that are capable of key generation and oracle signing. Websites can “enroll” a security key by asking it to generate a public key bound to an “appId” (which is limited by the browser based on the site's origin). Later, when a user wants to log in, the website…
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Golang SSH Redux
I’ll cover the post/blog, and then I’d like to counter some misconceptions. While part of me thinks “I must’ve been very unclear to have so many people misunderstand”, I also saw how many people commented without bothering to read, so really there’s a limit to how much self-flagellation will happen.
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Randomize your WiFi MAC address on Ubuntu
Your device’s MAC address can be used to track you across the WiFi networks you connect to. That data can be shared and sold, and often identifies you as an individual. It’s possible to limit this tracking by using pseudo-random MAC addresses.
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History of AOL Warez
Link to original post on rajuabju.com Before I begin, let me state the following: This is my personal perspective of the history of Warez ...
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The “Happy Path” to HTTPS
It's finally time: it's time the pendulum swings further towards the "secure by default" end of the scale than what it ever has before. At least insofar as securing web traffic goes because as of this week's Chrome 62's launch, any website with an input box
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Visiting a site that uses Disqus when not logged in sends URL to Facebook
I was surprised to see the Facebook SDK being loaded in the network tab on my blog when I don't have any Facebook buttons. It turned out to be coming courtesy of Disqus. No wonder Facebook knows everywhere you go!
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Welp, there go my Git signatures
Hello! If you already know about the RoCA vulnerability, and you know what I did about it (or you don’t care), then feel free to skip down to the good stuff! Signs of Trouble Monday morning,…
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Laptop Ban a Reaction to X-Ray Equipment Stolen by ISIS
On March 21st, 2017, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security ordered airlines flying to the U.S. out of 10 airports, mostly in Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East, to refuse to transport …
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How I Tricked Symantec with a Fake Private Key
This blog is written by Hanno Böck. Unless noted otherwise, its content is licensed as CC0 .
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The TSA's Selective Laptop Ban
Last Monday, the TSA announced a peculiar new security measure to take effect within 96 hours. Passengers flying into the US on foreign airlines from eight Muslim countries would be prohibited from carrying aboard any electronics larger than a smartphone. They would have to be checked and put into the cargo hold. And…
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Chrome to force .dev domains to HTTPS via preloaded HSTS
Google bought the .dev gTLD and Chrome 63 started force-redirecting every .dev domain to HTTPS via preloaded HSTS, breaking local dev setups. Here's why, and …
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Disqus comments adding third-party ad-tracking
I'm killing Disqus comments on my blog. Here's why.
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Class Breaks
There’s a concept from computer security known as a class break. It’s a particular security vulnerability that breaks not just one system, but an entire class of systems. Examples might be a vulnerability in a particular operating system that allows an attacker to take remote control of every computer that runs on…
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A Detailed Elliptic Curve Cryptography Tutorial
When adding two integers i and j of bitlength b, the result will be of bitlength b + 1 in the worst case. This means they can easily be naively added. If the result is larger or equal to F p one has only to subtract p from the result, i.e.:
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How I snatched 153k Ether after a bad Tinder date
Over the weekend, I did a lot of swiping right. I’ve never had a Tinder go this fast from match to agreeing on a date time this fast…
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TLS 1.2 Session Tickets
Session Tickets, specified in RFC 5077 , are a technique to resume TLS sessions by storing key material encrypted on the clients. In TLS 1.2 they speed up the handshake from two to one round-trips.
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How Torch broke ls and made me vulnerable
If used incorrectly, LD_LIBRARY_PATH can cause a plethora of issues
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Finding Ticketbleed
Ticketbleed (CVE-2016-9244) is a software vulnerability in the TLS stack of certain F5 products that allows a remote attacker to extract up to 31 bytes of uninitialized memory at a time, which can contain any kind of random sensitive information, like in Heartbleed.
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Signal intelligence 101: SIGINT targets
A quick overview of the various types of signal intelligence targets, with an emphasis on the Soviet Cold War systems
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Learning to break ciphers
Every now and then, I read a question about learning how to break ciphers, or more generally how to become a cryptographer/cryptologist. From my viewpoint, the most important part of learning this…