Topics /

Security & Privacy

The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 556 posts.

2018
431

Brute Force Incognito Browsing

Both Firefox and Chrome have a feature for creating temporary private browsing sessions. Firefox calls it Private Browsing and Chrome calls it Incognito Mode . Both work essentially the same way. A temporary browsing session is started without carrying over most existing session state (cookies, etc.), and no state…

433

Capsicum

I spent a couple of years evangelizing about Capsicum. I wrote many articles about it. So, it is very natural that I would also like to update you on this blog about the progress of the Capsicum project in FreeBSD, because this is what I’m doing in my free time. That said I feel that this blog wouldn’t be completed…

438

First-ever DNSSEC root key rollover

DNSSEC is a system of digital signatures that prevent DNS spoofing. Using DNSSEC, it does not matter where your DNS answers came from, since the DNS resolver or application can verify the DNSSEC signatures to ensure the DNS data is not tampered with..DNS is hierarchical, which means that the parent zone vouches for…

441

Fuzzing Like It’s 1989

With 2019 a day away, let’s reflect on the past to see how we can improve. Yes, let’s take a long look back 30 years and reflect on the original fuzzing paper, An Empirical Study of the Reliability of UNIX Utilities, and its 1995 follow-up, Fuzz Revisited, by Barton P. Miller. In this blog post, […]

448

Very Good Security

“Never answer an anonymous letter” —Yogi Berra Did you ever wonder why doctor offices ask for your social security number? They don’t want to keep your SSN, but it’s the primary “key” that identifies you to an insurance company. In computer science/math terms, they need to call a function. Let’s call it: int…

449

The NSA is not made of magic (2014)

I am regularly asked what is the most surprising thing about the Snowden NSA documents. It’s this: the NSA is not made of magic. Its tools are no different from what we have in our world, it’s just better-funded. X-KEYSCORE is Bro plus memory. FOXACID is Metasploit with a budget. QUANTUM is AirPwn with a seriously…

450

Insider Attack Resistance

Our smart devices, such as mobile phones and tablets, contain a wealth of important personal information that needs to be kept safe. Google is constantly trying to find new and better ways protect that valuable information on Android devices. From partnering with external researchers to find and fix vulnerabilities…