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Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere
Even the ‘successful’ contact tracing apps have fallen well below expectations, and incapable of discovering their effectiveness.
Topics /
Security & Privacy
The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 4,335 posts.
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Reviewing the cryptography used by Signal
Last year, I urged furries to stop using Telegram because it doesn’t actually provide them with any of the privacy guarantees they think it gives them. Instead of improving Telegram’s c…
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Porn Spam on Google Maps
User Generated Content is great, innit? As a company, I want users to submit photos, so I don't have to do any content curation. Moderation? Nah mate, stick some AI on there to filter out anything offensive and we're golden. *sigh* James Whatley (inactive)@WhatleydudeSurprised Loch Ness isn't trending tbqh.❤️ 7💬 0🔁…
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macOS Sonoma silently enabled iCloud Keychain despite my precautions
This is a follow-up to my blog post Updating from macOS Ventura to Sonoma silently enables iCloud Keychain . In the addendum to that blog post, I discussed a workaround, which was to delete my WiFi password right before rebooting into the updater. In a trial run on my M1 Mac mini, the workaround was successful.
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Yes, Android 14 still allows modification of system certificates
Tim Perry recently claimed in an article that “Android 14 blocks all modification of system certificates, even as root”. This sparked significant discussion on Hacker News. Thankfully my tests show that it is still possible to adjust the system certificate store in Android 14.
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Experian Site Can Give Anyone Your Credit Freeze PIN
An alert reader recently pointed my attention to a free online service offered by big-three credit bureau Experian that allows anyone to request the personal identification number (PIN) needed to unlock a consumer credit file that was previously frozen at Experian.
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ICE Awards $25M Iris-Scanning Contract to Bi2 Technologies
The no-bid deal is five times the size of the agency's previous contract with the Massachusetts company and could put devices in agents' hands by late June.
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Who controls your computer? and how to make sure it's you
Can you trust your computer? Can you control what it does and doesn’t? Or is someone else in control? How can you even know what it is or isn’t doing? Even if it tells you, how do you know it’s not lying? As computing systems become more complex, how can “Trusted Computing” be achieved, not (just) by big corporations…
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So You Want to Be a Penetration Tester?
This is an old and outdated version of the blog. If you haven’t read this post yet, then please see the new one for the most up-to-date content: “So You Want To Work in Cyber Security?”. This version is kept here for archival purposes only.
2623
HiveNightmare a.k.a. SeriousSAM – anybody can read the registry in Windows 10
This is the story of how all non-admin users can read the registry — and so elevate privileges and access sensitive credential information…
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$ sudo rm -rf / === NPM install
🔎I authored this blog post whilst I was an employee of Gitpod for Gitpod. I no longer work at Gitpod. In what seems like a long time ago, in part because it is, I learned the catastrophic capabilities of this command the hard way, and I'm sure folks my
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Consider Disabling Browser Push Notifications on Family and Friends Devices
A terrible user-hostile browser feature is being misused, surprising no one.
2626
Why you should never use hash functions for message authentication
The general thrust of this post is: use a MAC function like HMAC to sign data, don’t use hash functions. Although not all hash functions suffer from the problem I’m going to illustrate, in general using a hash function for message authentication comes with a lot of potential problems because those functions aren’t…
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DoS attacks against my online game
DDraceNetwork is an open source online game I’ve been running since 2013 with a community of volunteers. The game is available for free, I’m hosting servers for it in many countries around the world so that we have trusted official ranks . The servers are paid for by donations , which I stop collecting once the cost…
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The Power to Revoke Lies with the Certificate Authority
For those that read my blog often you may have seen me talk about EV certificates before. From a technical perspective there are many things that I don't agree with about EV certificates and from a non-technical perspective there are many things I don't like about the
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APFS encrypted plaintext password found in another log file
UPDATE: PLEASE HELP ME TEST At some point you just need to stop looking and be blissfully ignorant...this was not one of those days. In and update to my previously updated blog article , I have found another instance where the plaintext password was written to system logs. Thi
2631
Secure yourself, Part 1: Air-gapped computer, GPG and smartcards
This blog entry is part of a series covering: Logging into your laptop and decrypting it automatically Encrypting and decrypting any passwords or secure info you have Sending and receiving encrypted mails Providing 2-step authentication codes for your web logins Doing all of the above on your mobile phone…
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Schneier: The Dishonest Minority: Security and its Role in Modern Society
Three months ago, I announced that I was writing a book on why security exists in human societies. This is basically the book’s thesis statement: All complex systems contain parasites. In any system of cooperative behavior, an uncooperative strategy will be effective—and the system will tolerate the uncooperatives—as…
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Double encryption: Analyzing the NSA/GCHQ arguments against hybrids
In 2019, Google and Cloudflare ran an experiment where they upgraded HTTPS for many "real users’ connections" to use post-quantum encryption. They then reported statistics on how affordable this was. Google had also run a similar experiment in 2016: "While it's still very early days for quantum computers, we're…
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Amazonbot is finally respecting robots.txt
Thanks for giving me a viable business model Amazon!
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How to date a recording using background electrical noise
Three men were accused of selling firearms to South London gangs. At their 2012 trial in Croydon Crown Court, the prosecution played the jury a recording, taken undercover, of the trio allegedly arranging a sale. But the men’s lawyers claimed that the recording was a fake, and that the police had fabricated it by…
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Hacking Team and a case of BGP hijacking
After just a few hours the Hacking Team emails archive has already provided many tasty leaks. I want to focus on a routing security issue since this is my main research activity for this year.