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Security & Privacy
The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 240 posts.
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Fake ad blockers in Chrome Web Store
People searching for a Google Chrome ad blocking extension have to choose from dozens of similarly named extensions. Only few of these are legitimate, most are forks of open source ad blockers trying to attract users with misleading extension names and descriptions. What are these up to? Thanks to Andrey Meshkov we…
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Yubikey/Smartcard backed TLS servers
It has become clear that storing secrets in computers is hard. The best demo to the world that storing secrets on “online” computers is hard and sometimes devastating, is the large amounts of cryptocurrency theft due to critical keys being in memory of systems directly or indirectly connected to the internet.
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Hacking a cheap fitness tracker bracelet
A blog post on reverse engineering and customizing the firmware of a cheap fitness tracker bracelet.
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Think You’ve Got Your Credit Freezes Covered? Think Again
I spent a few days last week speaking at and attending a conference on responding to identity theft. The forum was held in Florida, one of the major epicenters for identity fraud complaints in United States. One gripe I heard from several presenters was that identity thieves increasingly are finding ways to open new…
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A Call of Duty exploit
A few years ago, I became aware of a security issue in most Call of Duty games. Although I did not discover it myself, I thought it might be interesting to see what it could be used for. Without going into detail, this security issue allows users playing a Call of Duty match to cause a buffer overflow on the host’s…
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How to build an NPM worm
npm is a registry and package manager for JavaScript that ships as part of Node.js . It's used by tens of millions of people to install hundreds of thousands of packages billions of times every week.
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CloudFlair: Bypassing CloudFlare using Internet-wide scan data
Cloudflare is a service that acts as a middleman between a website and its end users, protecting it from various attacks. Unfortunately, those websites are often poorly configured, allowing an attacker to entirely bypass Cloudflare and run DDoS attacks or exploit web-based vulnerabilities that would otherwise be…
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Fear the reaper: characterization and fast detection of card skimmers
Fear the reaper: characterization and fast detection of card skimmers Scaife et al., USENIX Security 2018 Until I can get my hands on a Skim Reaper I’m not sure I’ll ever trust an ATM or other expo…
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OAuth for the Open Web
OAuth has become the de facto standard for authorization and authentication on the web. Nearly every company with an API used by third party developers has implemented OAuth to enable people to build apps on top of it.
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Extracting SSH Private Keys from Windows 10 ssh-agent
The newest Windows 10 update includes OpenSSH utilities, including ssh-agent. Here’s how to extract unencrypted saved private keys from the registry
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Supply Chain Security Is the Whole Enchilada, but Who’s Willing to Pay for It?
From time to time, there emerge cybersecurity stories of such potential impact that they have the effect of making all other security concerns seem minuscule and trifling by comparison. Yesterday was one of those times. Bloomberg Businessweek on Thursday published a bombshell investigation alleging that Chinese cyber…
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A more privacy-friendly blog
Over the years, I have implemented some changes to this blog to make it more privacy-friendly.
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Mobile Device Management invades privacy
With BYOD, companies are more than ever keen on protecting their data. MDM tools, like Google Apps, do more than that; they invade your privacy.
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Mythology About Security
Ed Felton tweeted a few days ago: “Often hear that the reason today’s Internet is not more secure is that the early designers failed to imagine that security could ever matter. That is a myth…
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Who and what is Coinhive?
Multiple security firms recently identified cryptocurrency mining service Coinhive as the top malicious threat to Web users, thanks to the tendency for Coinhive’s computer code to be used on hacked Web sites to steal the processing power of its visitors’ devices. This post looks at how Coinhive vaulted to the top of…
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Fully Homomorphic Encryption: Secret Key Homomorphic Encryption Over Integers
In the previous post we discussed homomorphic encryption in it’s most abstract terms we presented Paillier as a partially homomorphic encryption . Thank you @mortendahlcs for making a clarification about the terms described :
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The mysterious case of missing URLs and Google's AMP
When I saw a speculative article about Google wanting to “kill” URLs appear in my news feed, I didn’t think too much about it. Trying to hide “ugly” URLs… well, that feels like a natural thing for an app to try and do. Designers of apps often (erroneously) assume that users cannot cope with “technical” things like…
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Advanced Denanonymization through Strava
Strava is getting some bad press, because its heatmap can be used to infer the existence and floorplan of various US/UK military and govt...
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GDPR complaints against Google’s deceptive practices to track user location
Based on new research published today by BEUC’s Norwegian member Forbrukerrådet, seven consumer groups are filing complaints against Google with their national data protection authorities.
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From VNC to reverse shell
Personal websites are weird. We are mostly past the era of having them, as things like twitter and hosted blog services like Medium have taken them over, but I’m a hold out. I run both my own blog, and have a landing page on the apex domain since the server that hosts the blog (Google App Engine + Cloudflare) is…
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De-anonymizing programmers from executable binaries
When coding style survives compilation: de-anonymizing programmers from executable binaries Caliskan et al., NDSS’18 As a programmer you have a unique style, and stylometry techniques can be used t…
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