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The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 4,335 posts.
Random numbers are critical for cryptography: for encryption keys, random authentication challenges, initialization vectors, nonces, key-agreement schemes, generating prime numbers and so on. Break the random-number generator, and most of the time you break the entire security system. Which is why you should worry…
Twitter was hacked this week. Not a few people’s Twitter accounts, but all of Twitter. Someone compromised the entire Twitter network, probably by stealing the log-in credentials of one of Twitter’s system administrators. Those are the people trusted to ensure that Twitter functions smoothly. The hacker used that…
About a year ago I wrote a short post urging Apple to publish the technical details of iMessage encryption. I’d love tell you that Apple saw my influential crypto blogging and fell all over t…
I delivered my traditional Go Cryptography State of the Union talk at GopherCon US 2025 in New York. It goes into everything that happened at the intersection of Go and cryptography over the last year.
My last post described how user-level CPU profilers work, and specifically how Google’s pprof profiler gathers its CPU profiles with the help of the operating system. The specific feature needed from the operating system is the profiling timer provided by setitimer (2) and the SIGPROF signals that it delivers.
Back in 2009 I wrote an Arduino library ( IRRemote ) to encode and decode infrared signals for remote controls. I got an email recently fr...
Fifth post in the series, covering how to obtain GPL source code, disassemble MIPS binaries with tools like IDA, and search the firmware for a default WiFi p...
For enterprise software, the software supply chain presents some of the biggest risks today to data privacy and security.
This “feature” accomplishes nothing of value for anyone, including the streaming services, but imposes a massive (and for most people, confusing and frustrating) hindrance on honest people simply trying to easily capture high-quality (as opposed to, say, using their damn phone to take a photograph of their reflective…
This is the story of a bug that was discovered and fixed in Telegram’s self-rolled cryptographic protocol about seven years ago. The bug didn’t get any press, and no one seems to know about it, probably because it was only published in Russian.
Interesting things about passkeys in webauthn
Management of kernel extensions has changed significantly in Big Sur and later. This overview for users contrasts kexts with user-level extensions which are replacing them.
I’ve been reading a bunch of anecdotal reports that the TSA is starting to scan paper separately: A passenger going through security at Kansas City International Airport (MCI) recently was asked by security officers to remove all paper products from his bag. Everything from books to Post-It Notes, documents and more…
A Florida teenager who served as a lackey for a cybercriminal group that specializes in cryptocurrency thefts was beaten and kidnapped last week by a rival cybercrime gang. The teen’s captives held guns to his head while forcing him to record a video message pleading with his crew to fork over a $200,000 ransom in…
This investigation into email tracking attempts to deconstruct tracking links and pixels and highlight the data that is being collected. It covers Mailchimp, …
I am deeply skeptical of the FBI’s announcement on Friday that North Korea was behind last month’s Sony hack. The agency’s evidence is tenuous, and I have a hard time believing it. But I also have trouble believing that the US government would make the accusation this formally if officials didn’t believe it. Clues in…
A “distrust” is when a certification authority (CA) that issues HTTPS certificates to websites is removed from a root store because it is no longer trusted to issue certificates. This means certificates issued by that CA will be treated as invalid, likely causing certificate error interstitials in any browser that…
There’s a story on Hacker News asking what the hell is going on with the Truecrypt audit. I think that’s a fair question, since we have been awfully quiet lately. To everyone who donate…
A dive into the spectrum of sandboxing and isolation, from Linux namespaces and gVisor to hardware-enforced microVMs and WebAssembly, and why picking the right boundary matters for multi-tenant workloads.
A Ukrainian man indicted in 2012 for conspiring with a prolific hacking group to steal tens of millions of dollars from U.S. businesses was arrested in Italy and is now in custody in the United States, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.
Earlier this month, a retired New York City locksmith was selling a set of “master keys” on eBay: Three of the five are standard issue for members of the FDNY, and the set had a metal dog tag that was embossed with an FDNY lieutenant’s shield number, 6896. The keys include the all-purpose “1620,” a master firefighter…
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…
I’m a college student studying abroad at the University of Pennsylvania, studying a mixture of CS, Physics and Music. This semester I decided to take a course CIS551: Network and Computer Security, eager to learn about the field. This is the story of how as part of the course, I compromised the security of one […]
I'll start this post where I start many of my talks - what does a hacker look like? Or perhaps more specifically, what do people think a hacker looks like? It's probably a scary image, one that's a bit mysterious, a shady character lurking in the hidden depths
