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Security & Privacy

The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 8,774 posts.

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8136

R5N - Obfuscated mesh routing on hostile networks.

This document contains the R 5 N DHT technical specification. R 5 N is a secure distributed hash table (DHT) routing algorithm and data structure for decentralized applications. It features an open peer-to-peer overlay routing mechanism which supports ad-hoc permissionless participation and support for topologies in…

8143

Cannoli: The Fast QEMU Tracer

Cannoli Cannoli is a high-performance tracing engine for qemu-user. It can record a trace of both PCs executed as well as memory operations. It consists of a small patch to QEMU to expose locations to inject some code directly into the JIT, a shared library which is loaded

8149

Domain hacks with unusual Unicode characters

Unicode contains a range of symbols which don't get much use. For example, there are separate symbols for TradeMark - ™, Service Mark - ℠, and Prescriptions - ℞. Nestling among the "Letterlike Symbols" are two curious entries. Both of these are single characters: Telephone symbol - ℡ Numero Sign - № What's interesting…

8153

Law Enforcement Undermines Tor

Few weeks ago, the German political magazine Panorama and STRG_F reported that law enforcement agencies infiltrated the Tor network in order to expose criminals. The reporters had access to documents showing four successful deanonymizations. I was given the chance to review some documents. In this post, I am…

8156

Cracking LUKS/dm-crypt passphrases

Linux uses dm-crypt in order to provide transparent disk or partition encryption. What are the options in case you need to recover passphrase from such encryption? There are already ready-made tools, but we have also produced and published our own in order to support newer LUKS format/ciphers/hashing.

8157

Root a Mac in 10 seconds or less

Often times, physical access to a machine means game over. While people like to think that OSX is immune to most security threats, even Apple computers can be susceptible to physical attacks. Mac OSX is capable of booting into single user mode by holding a special key combination (Command-S). From this point, an…

8158

I'm not a fan of Deno's security model (2024)

this has been bothering me for a while now, so I want to write down my thoughts so I can get it out of my head and move on. we’re gonna talk about how Deno approaches security, specifically with its permissions system, and why I think this approach is fundamentally insecure and misleading.

8160

The Information Apocalypse (2018)

My friend Aviv was recently the subject of a popular Buzzfeed article about the possibility of an impending “information apocalypse”. tl;dr: Aviv extrapolates from the fake news crisis that started in 2016 to a world in which anyone can create AI-assisted misinformation campaigns indistinguishable from reality to the…