Fighting cryptojacking and doing good things with content security policies
If you've landed on this page because you saw a strange message on a completely different website then followed a link to here, drop a note to the site owner and let them know what happened. If, on the other hand, you're on this page because you're
Fintech Giant Fiserv Used Unclaimed Domain
If you sell Web-based software for a living and ship code that references an unregistered domain name, you are asking for trouble. But when the same mistake is made by a Fortune 500 company, the results can range from costly to disastrous. Here’s the story of one such goof committed by Fiserv [ NASDAQ:FISV ], a $15…
Infosec Core Competencies
An incomplete list of (technical) things just about anybody working in Information Security would benefit from knowing.
No, RSA Is Not Broken
I have been seeing this paper by cryptographer Peter Schnorr making the rounds: “Fast Factoring Integers by SVP Algorithms.” It describes a new factoring method, and its abstract ends with the provocative sentence: “This destroys the RSA cryptosystem.” It does not. At best, it’s an improvement in factoring—and I’m not…
Netmask NPM package, used by 270k+ projects, vulnerable to octal input data
The following research outlines a vulnerability discovered in netmask npm package that is currently used by 278,722+ other projects. The vulnerability has been present for 9 years. Since this package is so incredibly widespread, I would suggest every nodejs developer to check their package.jsons to see if they use…
Microsoft Issues Emergency Patch for Windows Flaw
Microsoft on Tuesday issued an emergency software update to quash a security bug that’s been dubbed “ PrintNightmare ,” a critical vulnerability in all supported versions of Windows that is actively being exploited. The fix comes a week ahead of Microsoft’s normal monthly Patch Tuesday release, and follows the…
Wanted: Disgruntled Employees to Deploy Ransomware
Criminal hackers will try almost anything to get inside a profitable enterprise and secure a million-dollar payday from a ransomware infection. Apparently now that includes emailing employees directly and asking them to unleash the malware inside their employer’s network in exchange for a percentage of any ransom…
Reading the AGPL
a guided introduction for first-timers
Linux Capabilities in a nutshell (2019)
Linux capabilities can be difficult to understand so let's go through them quickly
Analyzing and breaking an externally encrypted HDD
Analyzing and breaking external encrypted HDD has been a “hobby” of mine for quite some time. With my colleagues Joffrey Czarny and Julien Lenoir we looked at several models in the past :
Chrome client “variations” can be used to identify you (2020)
Until now I used Chrome with a few settings tweak like disabling sending usage statistics, uBlock origin, no crash reports and so on.
What security does a default OpenBSD installation offer?
In this text I will explain what makes OpenBSD secure by default when you install it. Do not take this for a security analysis, but more like a guide to help you understand what is done by OpenBSD to have a secure environment. The purpose of this text is not to compare OpenBSD to other OSes but to say what you can…
Valid Signal privacy issues shrugged off while patches quietly rolled out
kelly kaoudis: application security, hacking, software engineering blog
64-Bit Linux Return-Oriented Programming
Update : Dongli Zhang reports that newer Linux versions organize the stack differently . The code below will need to be modified accordingly.
Distributing unnotarized Mac apps in a text file
This isn't a late April Fools joke. (My April Fools joke that I got hired by Apple as a Swift Evangelist backfired with a profusion of congratulations.) This blog post is a kind of follow-up to some previous blog posts. Last month I wondered what's the best way to distribute Mac apps without notarization , and I…
How Not to Redact a Warhead
How the wrong settings on a photocopier has let us have a glimpse at a forbidden image of a modern thermonuclear warhead.
Isolating Xwayland in a VM
In my last post, Qubes-lite with KVM and Wayland, I described setting up a Qubes-inspired Linux system that runs applications in virtual machines. A …
When did “privacy issues” start to mean “too much privacy”?
Clubhouse draws the ire of journalists
You don't need to burn off your fingertips (and other biometric myths)
111 years ago almost to the day, a murder was committed which ultimately led to the first criminal trial to use fingerprints as evidence [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/first-case-where-fingerprints-were-used-evidence-180970883/] . We've all since watched enough crime shows to understand that fingerprints are