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The Great $50M African IP Address Heist
A top executive at the nonprofit entity responsible for doling out chunks of Internet addresses to businesses and other organizations in Africa has resigned his post following accusations that he secretly operated several companies which sold tens of millions of dollars worth of the increasingly scarce resource to…
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Unsolicited messages on Keybase
What is Keybase? Keybase ( keybase.io ) is a platform designed to help users send and receive encrypted communications as well as secu...
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Modeling Adversaries with TLA+
A common question I get about specs is how to model bad actors. Usually this is one of two contexts: The spec involves several interacting agents sharing a protocol, but some of the nodes are faulty or malicious: they will intentionally try to subvert the system. The spec involves an agent subject to outside forces…
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DNS servers that offer privacy and filtering
If you’re a programmer, a systems administrator, or really any type of IT worker, you probably have your favorite go-to IP addresses for troubleshooting.
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Reverse engineering GoDaddy's tracking script
An article by Igor Kromin has provided an insight into a practice by GoDaddy involving injecting Javascript into customer sites. Several people expressed interest in a breakdown of the script - so here it is. Please review Igor’s original blog for further background
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Stuxnet was embarrassing, not amazing (2011)
As the New York Times posts yet another breathless story about Stuxnet, I’m surprised that no one has pointed out its obvious deficiencies. Everyone seems to be hyperventilating about its pur…
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Microsoft is Abandoning SHA-1 Hashes for Updates
Microsoft is shipping a patch to eliminate SHA-1 hashes from its update process. There’s nothing wrong with eliminating SHA-1—but their reasoning may be very interesting.
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Wireless attacks on aircraft instrument landing systems
Wireless attacks on aircraft instrument landing systems Sathaye et al., USENIX Security Symposium 2019 It’s been a while since we last looked at security attacks against connected real-world entiti…
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Facebook’s Privacy Cake
Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement of A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking is not some dramatic pivot: it is a growth opportunity for Facebook and a challenge for regulators.
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Investigating the 900GB “Collection #1-5” password leaks with R
This post shows how to process gigabytes of unstructured data with the Spark framework and using the R language.
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Characterizing secret leakage in public GitHub repositories
How bad can it git? Characterizing secret leakage in public GitHub repositories Meli et al., NDSS’19 On the one hand you might say there’s no new news here. We know that developers shouldn’t …
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Software Security Is a Programming Languages Issue (2018)
Software security must be addressed by all programmers, not just security experts. So we teach it in CS 330, a programming (languages) class.
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Blockchain and Trust
In his 2008 white paper that first proposed bitcoin, the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto concluded with: “We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust.” He was referring to blockchain, the system behind bitcoin cryptocurrency. The circumvention of trust is a great promise, but it’s just…
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Firefox Local Files Theft – Not Patched Yet
Recently, I was performing a research on Same Origin Policy attacks, I managed to realize that the la version of Firefox (currently 67) is vulnerable to local files theft attack (on any supported OS), due to improper implementation of Same Origin Policy for file scheme URIs. Let’s go over the PoC details then I will…
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Stealing sensitive browser data with the W3C Ambient Light Sensor API (2017)
In this post we describe and demonstrate a neat trick to exfiltrate sensitive information from your browser using a surprising tool: your smartphone or laptop’s ambient light sensor. In short: 1. We provide background about the light sensor API and current discussions to expose it more broadly to websites.
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Who can I hire to hack me?
I use a password manager. I have 2FA set up on everything. When an organisation asks me to set a recovery question, I generate a 32 character passphrase. I don't use my mother's maiden name or my first pet's birthday on anything sensitive. I monitor my email addresses for breaches, and I regularly check my credit…
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RSA: Theory and Implementation
RSA has been a staple of public key cryptography for over 40 years, and is still being used today for some tasks in the newest TLS 1.3 standard. This post describes the theory behind RSA - the math that makes it work, as well as some practical considerations; it also presents a complete implementation of RSA key…
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Ransomware, Data Breaches at Hospitals Tied to Uptick in Fatal Heart Attacks
Hospitals that have been hit by a data breach or ransomware attack can expect to see an increase in the death rate among heart patients in the following months or years because of cybersecurity remediation efforts, a new study posits. Health industry experts say the findings should prompt a larger review of how…
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Flight stats, entertainment, and trying to crack Widevine
Investigating onboard flight entertainment APIs, flight telemetry, and Widevine-protected media.
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One Year After ‘The Big Hack’
Today marks the one-year anniversary of Bloomberg’s publication of a story about Chinese intelligence intercepting the supply chain of Supermicro, a company which has built and sold servers to Amazon, Apple, the U.S. Department of Defense, and dozens of other companies. Apparently, they developed a chip that looked…