Best of 2014

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2014. 204 posts.

Security & Privacy
102

RTFM 0day in iOS apps

DIN INFO IP Adresse ( IPv4 eller IPv6) 104.165.132.197 Port: 47376 Hostnavn: 104.165.132.197 X-Forward IP Adresse(r): Browser (UserAgent): Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/152.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Forespørgsels Timestamp (Unix tid): 1793882617 Forespørgsels…

108

No, don't enable revocation checking

Revocation checking is in the news again because of a large number of revocations resulting from precautionary rotations for servers affected by the OpenSSL heartbeat bug. However, revocation checking is a complex topic and there's a fair amount of misinformation around. In short, it doesn't work and you are no more…

109

LibreSSL's PRNG is Unsafe on Linux

The first version of LibreSSL portable, 2.0.0, was released a few days ago (followed soon after by 2.0.1 ). Despite the 2.0.x version numbers, these are only preview releases and shouldn't be used in production yet, but have been released to solicit testing and feedback. After testing and examining the codebase, my…

115

Did North Korea Really Attack Sony?

I am deeply skeptical of the FBI’s announcement on Friday that North Korea was behind last month’s Sony hack. The agency’s evidence is tenuous, and I have a hard time believing it. But I also have trouble believing that the US government would make the accusation this formally if officials didn’t believe it. Clues in…