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Security & Privacy

The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 8,770 posts.

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5613

GitHub Spam

Spam on GitHub is getting out of control and affecting 10,000's of users daily. GitHub is seemly doing nothing about it, here is the proof.

5616

DOMPurify bypass: XSS via HTML namespace confusion

Securitum is a pure pentesting company specialising in the security of IT systems. We have experience in performing security audits (including penetration tests) - mainly for financial/e-commerce/industrial sectors. We have performed penetration tests and cyber security services for leading European banks (see…

5617

When Undercover Credit Card Buys Go Bad

I recently heard from a source in law enforcement who had a peculiar problem. The source investigates cybercrime, and he was reaching out for advice after trying but failing to conduct undercover buys of stolen credit cards from a well-known underground card market. Turns out, the cybercrime bazaar’s own security…

5622

Screenshot-proof images via temporal dithering

Snapchat 's (and now Facebook Poke 's) main claim to fame is that it lets you send "self-destructing" image messages. Setting aside the debate about the uses of this beyond sexting , the key vulnerability in both apps is the built-in ability to take screenshots. Both take a reactive approach, where you're notified if…

5630

Boring SSL

Earlier this year, before Apple had too many goto fails and GnuTLS had too few , before everyone learnt that TLS heart-beat messages were a thing and that some bugs are really old , I started a tidy up of the OpenSSL code that we use at Google.

5631

Debugging macOS Kernel Using VirtualBox

Update: In the HN discussion, awalton mentioned you can set CPUID flags in VMWare. Simply adding cpuid.7.ebx = "-----------0--------------------" to the vmx file will disable SMAP. Late last year, I upgraded my old MBP to the 2016 model with a Skylake processor. As I was debugging a kernel exploit, it turned out that…

5638

Fuzzing PCI express: security in plaintext

Google recently launched GPUs on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), which will allow customers to leverage this hardware for highly parallel workloads. These GPUs are connected to our cloud machines via a variety of PCIe switches, and that required us to have a deep understanding of PCIe security.