Topics /

Security & Privacy

The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 431 posts.

2013
213

Where “nothing to hide” fails as logic

Every April, I try to wade through mounds of paperwork to file my taxes. Like most Americans, I’m trying to follow the law and pay all of the taxes that I owe without getting screwed in the process. I try and make sure that every donation I made is backed by proof, every deduction is backed by logic and documentation…

221

Securing Ubuntu

Table of Contents Initial Setup Setting up iptables and Fail2Ban Fail2Ban iptables rules Make shared memory read-only Setting up Bastille Linux Configuring Bastille sysctl hardening Setting up a chroot environment Securing nginx inside the chroot Extras Initial Setup Let’s login to our new machine and take some…

225

Hacking the OS X Kernel for Fun and Profiles

My last post described how user-level CPU profilers work, and specifically how Google’s pprof profiler gathers its CPU profiles with the help of the operating system. The specific feature needed from the operating system is the profiling timer provided by setitimer (2) and the SIGPROF signals that it delivers.

226

How I attacked a fellow student

I’m a college student studying abroad at the University of Pennsylvania, studying a mixture of CS, Physics and Music. This semester I decided to take a course CIS551: Network and Computer Security, eager to learn about the field. This is the story of how as part of the course, I compromised the security of one […]

229

Exploiting a Bug in Google's Glass

A few days ago, I posted to Twitter a picture I took of a Google Glass unit running software that I had modified. I did this while in the Bay Area after picking it up from Google's headquarters in Mountain View. I was unable to provide many more details at the time, as I first was busy driving home, and then became…

236

Android RNG Weakness Renders Bitcoin Wallets Insecure

We recently learned that a component of Android responsible for generating secure random numbers contains critical weaknesses , that render all Android wallets generated to date vulnerable to theft. Because the problem lies with Android itself, this problem will affect you if you have a wallet generated by any Android…

240

The Fallacy of Cracking Contests (1998)

In this issue: The Fallacy of Cracking Contests How to Recognize Plaintext News The Doghouse: Iomega Zip Disks Counterpane Systems News Final Report from the Commerce Department Technical Advisory Committee on Key Recovery Comments From Readers About "CRYPTO-GRAM"