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My Heart Bleeds for OpenSSL
Overview Today has been eventful, to say that least. My colleague and I patched several services, re-issued keys for them and started the ...
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Jamming XKeyScore
Back in the day there was talk about "jamming echelon" by adding keywords to email that the echelon system was supposedly looking for. We ca...
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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.
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Malicious Use of the HTML5 Vibrate API
There is a new API in town! HTML5 will (soon) let you make the user's device vibrate. What fun! Obviously, it's useful for triggering alerts, improved immersivness during gameplay, and all sorts of other fun things like sending Morse Code messages via vibration. At the moment, Chrome (and other Android browsers) ask…
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Hacking Airline Lounges for Free Meals
I think this is a great hack: A man bought a first-class ticket and used it to have free meals and drinks at the airport’s VIP lounge almost every day for nearly a year, Kwong Wah Yit Poh reported. The itinerary for the ticket was found to have been changed more than 300 times within a year, and the owner of the…
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Unraveling NSA's TURBULENCE Programs
The NSA TURBULENCE program was first revealed in 2007 by the Baltimore Sun for being over-budget and poorly-managed 1 2 . Many documents from the Snowden trove from the past two years reference parts of this program, but no coherent story or overview of how these programs operate together has been described. This is…
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Bash bug: the other two RCEs, or how we chipped away at the original fix
The patch that implements a prefix-based way to mitigate vulnerabilities in bash function exports has been out since last week and has been...
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Target Hackers Broke in via HVAC Company
Last week, Target told reporters at The Wall Street Journal and Reuters that the initial intrusion into its systems was traced back to network credentials that were stolen from a third party vendor. Sources now tell KrebsOnSecurity that the vendor in question was a refrigeration, heating and air conditioning…
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Predicting the next Math.random() in Java
A while back a friend of mine hosted a programming competition where you were given 9 random numbers one at a time and you had to guess the rank (the sorted position amongst the 9) of each as they are coming in. The goal was to submit a strategy in Java that will maximize the number of these games won. The best…
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Algorithmic complexity attacks and libc qsort()
An algorithmic complexity attack is a denial of service attack that triggers worst case behaviour in code that is otherwise expected to perform well. The canonical example would be the widely published attacks against hash table implementations , where carefully crafted inputs made snappy \(O(1)\) operations…
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The Linux Security Circus: On GUI isolation
There certainly is one thing that most Linux users don't realize about their Linux systems... this is the lack of GUI-level isolation, and ...
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How Verizon's Advertising Header Works
Over the past couple of days, there’s been an outpouring of concern about Verizon’s advertising practices. Verizon Wireless is injecting a unique identifier into web requests, as data transits the network. On my phone, for example, here’s the extra HTTP header. 1
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Fun with Shellshock
This is great work. Though I must confess I’m more interested (and far more uneasy) about the other side of the coin — people developing projects like these involving machine learning to find and exploit the vulnerabilities in a fully automated fashion. This is related to, but not quite the same as, attempts at…
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Why Apple's iPhone encryption won't stop NSA
Recent news headlines have made a big deal of Apple encrypting more of the storage on their handsets, and claiming to not have a key. Depend...
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Lorem Ipsum: Of Good and Evil, Google and China
Imagine discovering a secret language spoken only online by a knowledgeable and learned few. Over a period of weeks, as you begin to tease out the meaning of this curious tongue and ponder its purpose, the language appears to shift in subtle but fantastic ways, remaking itself daily before your eyes. And just when you…
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