Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 268 posts.

Security & Privacy
123

Se­cu­rity Keys

Security Keys are (generally) USB-connected hardware fobs that are capable of key generation and oracle signing. Websites can “enroll” a security key by asking it to generate a public key bound to an “appId” (which is limited by the browser based on the site's origin). Later, when a user wants to log in, the website…

125

Golang SSH Redux

I’ll cover the post/blog, and then I’d like to counter some misconceptions. While part of me thinks “I must’ve been very unclear to have so many people misunderstand”, I also saw how many people commented without bothering to read, so really there’s a limit to how much self-flagellation will happen.

136

The TSA's Selective Laptop Ban

Last Monday, the TSA announced a peculiar new security measure to take effect within 96 hours. Passengers flying into the US on foreign airlines from eight Muslim countries would be prohibited from carrying aboard any electronics larger than a smartphone. They would have to be checked and put into the cargo hold. And…

142

Class Breaks

There’s a concept from computer security known as a class break. It’s a particular security vulnerability that breaks not just one system, but an entire class of systems. Examples might be a vulnerability in a particular operating system that allows an attacker to take remote control of every computer that runs on…

148

Finding Ticketbleed

Ticketbleed (CVE-2016-9244) is a software vulnerability in the TLS stack of certain F5 products that allows a remote attacker to extract up to 31 bytes of uninitialized memory at a time, which can contain any kind of random sensitive information, like in Heartbleed.