Best of 2018

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2018. 316 posts.

Security & Privacy
249

Fuzzing Like It’s 1989

With 2019 a day away, let’s reflect on the past to see how we can improve. Yes, let’s take a long look back 30 years and reflect on the original fuzzing paper, An Empirical Study of the Reliability of UNIX Utilities, and its 1995 follow-up, Fuzz Revisited, by Barton P. Miller. In this blog post, […]

253

Very Good Security

“Never answer an anonymous letter” —Yogi Berra Did you ever wonder why doctor offices ask for your social security number? They don’t want to keep your SSN, but it’s the primary “key” that identifies you to an insurance company. In computer science/math terms, they need to call a function. Let’s call it: int…

254

Insider Attack Resistance

Our smart devices, such as mobile phones and tablets, contain a wealth of important personal information that needs to be kept safe. Google is constantly trying to find new and better ways protect that valuable information on Android devices. From partnering with external researchers to find and fix vulnerabilities…

269

Setback in the outback

Like many others, we have been following the latest developments in Australia related to the “Assistance and Access” bill with a growing sense of frustration. The widespread adoption of strong cryptography and end-to-end encryption has given people around the world the ability to protect their pe...