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Security & Privacy

The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 617 posts.

2023
152

Google OAuth is broken (sort of)

Today I’m publicizing a Google OAuth vulnerability that allows employees at companies to retain indefinite access to applications like Slack and Zoom, after they’re off-boarded and removed from their company’s Google organization. The vulnerability is easy for a non-technical audience to understand and exploit.

157

UCLA computer grad constructs “crown jewel of cryptography”

Aayush Jain’s dissertation, “Indistinguishability Obfuscation from Well-Studied Assumptions,” established the feasibility of mathematically rigorous software obfuscation from well-studied hardness conjectures. The central goal of software obfuscation is to transform source code to make it unintelligible without…

158

iCloud Drive silently deletes your content

The first time it happened, I was writing a paper. The paragraphs I had just typed vanished into thin air, faster than Time Machine or Backblaze could save them. Gone. The next occurrence was during app development; Xcode suddenly flagged numerous errors in previously error-free code. My recent changes to several…

160

Valve bans 40k Dota 2 accounts using honeypot patch

Today, we permanently banned over 40,000 accounts that were using third-party software to cheat in Dota over the last few weeks. This software was able to access information used internally by the Dota client that wasn't visible during normal gameplay, giving the cheater an unfair advantage. While fixing the…

164

How I Made a Heap Overflow in Curl

In association with the release of curl 8.4.0, we publish a security advisory and all the details for CVE-2023-38545. This problem is the worst security problem found in curl in a long time. We set it to severity HIGH. While the advisory contains all the necessary details. I figured I would use a few additional ……

169

How likely is losing a Google account?

Let's say you use a Google account as the root of your online identity: Gmail, Fi, "Sign in with Google", Google's password manager, etc. How much should you be worried that you'll suddenly find yourself unable to get into everything? Should you do something else instead? To get a sense of how common lockouts are and…

179

UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption

In an open letter, seven secure messaging apps—including Signal and WhatsApp—point out that the UK’s Online Safety Bill could destroy end-to-end encryption: As currently drafted, the Bill could break end-to-end encryption,opening the door to routine, general and indiscriminate surveillance of personal messages of…