Best of 2019

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2019. 579 posts.

Security & Privacy
158

Attorney General Barr and Encryption

Last month, Attorney General William Barr gave a major speech on encryption policy­—what is commonly known as “going dark.” Speaking at Fordham University in New York, he admitted that adding backdoors decreases security but that it is worth it. Some hold this view dogmatically, claiming that it is technologically…

160

Infectious Executable Stacks

In software development there are many concepts that at first glance seem useful and sound, but, after considering the consequences of their implementation and use, are actually horrifying. Examples include thread cancellation , variable length arrays , and memory aliasing . GCC’s closure extension to C is another…

161

Modern C++ Won't Save Us

I’m a frequent critic of memory unsafe languages, principally C and C++, and how they induce an exceptional number of security vulnerabilities. My conclusion, based on reviewing evidence from numerous large software projects using C and C++, is that we need to be migrating our industry to memory safe by default…

171

Modern Alternatives to PGP

Did your last Yubikey just break? Perhaps you forgot an offline backup password. Maybe you’re just tired of living like a spy and never using smartphones. Whatever it is, you’re here, and you’re finally ready to give up on PGP. That’s great! We’re here to help! No one was sending you encrypted emails anyway, so that’s…

172

CSRF is really dead

A little while back I wrote a blog post about how "CSRF is dead". It focused on SameSite cookies, a powerful yet simple feature to protect your website against CSRF attacks. As powerful as it was, and as much as it will kill CSRF, you had to enable it on