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Security & Privacy

The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 8,768 posts.

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4021

A little game to demonstrate timing attacks.

Lauren Ipsum is trying to get past Jane Hecate, a little old lady who holds the Book of Passwords. Jane is older and can't see well, so she has to spell out Lauren's guess letter by letter to check whether it's the right password. How can Lauren use this to her advantage? A story about computer science and other…

4022

Simple Encrypted Arithmetic Library goes open source

Today we are extremely excited to announce that our Microsoft Simple Encrypted Arithmetic Library (Microsoft SEAL), an easy-to-use homomorphic encryption library developed by researchers in the Cryptography Research group at Microsoft, is open source on GitHub under an MIT License for free use. The library has already…

4025

Elliptic Curve Cryptography: A Basic Introduction

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is a modern public-key encryption technique famous for being smaller, faster, and more efficient than incumbents. Bitcoin, for example, uses ECC as its asymmetric cryptosystem because it is so lightweight. The mathematical entity that makes all of this possible is the elliptic curve…

4028

New Pegasus spyware abuses identified in Mexico

Mexican digital rights organization R3D, with technical support from the Citizen Lab, has determined that Mexican journalists and a human rights defender were infected with Pegasus between 2019 and 2021. The infections occurred years after the first revelations of Pegasus abuses in Mexico, and after Mexico’s current…

4030

Why Does My Remote Control Need to Know My Location?

Here's an interesting user-hostile pattern which could easily be avoided if programmers and business-people thought like regular humans. I have a Pioneer / Onkyo sound system. It's pretty nice and comes with a (not too crappy) Android app to let me remote control it. One day, the app updated itself. The changelog was…

4031

Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

The Open Source Technology Improvement Fund is proud to share the results of our security audit of Ruby on Rails . Ruby on Rails (or “Rails”) is an open source full stack web-application framework. Thanks to the help of X41 D-Sec , GitLab , and the Sovereign Tech Agency , Rails can provide more secure versions of the…

4042

Government-Linked Certificate Authorities in OS X

I’ve been sitting on this information for some time, waiting to get more research done before I publish a post. But since word has come out about how Lenovo preloads what amounts to very bad spyware on their PCs, I thought I should also just go right ahead to spill the beans on the Mac.

4043

A Survival Guide for the Small Mail Server

Nowadays many companies and organizations (non-profits, units of governmental and educational institutions, etc) believe that running their own mail servers has become an impossible task, due both to the large amount of inbound spam and to the continuous attempts by spammers to send outbound spam through their mail…

4045

Does Your Domain Have a Registry Lock?

If you’re running a business online, few things can be as disruptive or destructive to your brand as someone stealing your company’s domain name and doing whatever they wish with it. Even so, most major Web site owners aren’t taking full advantage of the security tools available to protect their domains from being…

4046

Towards a More Open Secure Element Chip

“ Secure Element ” (SE) chips have traditionally taken a very closed-source, NDA-heavy approach. Thus, it piqued my interest when an early-stage SE chip startup, Cramium (still in stealth mode), approached me to advise on open source strategy. This blog post explains my reasoning for agreeing to advise Cramium, and…