Best of 2021

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2021. 312 posts.

Security & Privacy
125

SAML Is Insecure by Design

What is SAML? Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) is an open standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between parties. Source: Wikipedia SAML is often used for single-sign on (“Sign in with Google”, “Sign in with Twitter” etc.). It means when you want to log in to example.com, example.com…

129

EBCDIC is incompatible with GDPR

Welcome to acronym city! The Court of Appeal of Brussels has made an interesting ruling. A customer complained that their bank was spelling the customer's name incorrectly. The bank didn't have support for diacritical marks. Things like á, è, ô, ü, ç etc. Those accents are common in many languages. So it was a little…

135

Beg Bounties

When someone passed me hundreds of thousands of records on kids taken from CloudPets a few years ago [https://www.troyhunt.com/data-from-connected-cloudpets-teddy-bears-leaked-and-ransomed-exposing-kids-voice-messages/] , I had a nightmare of a time getting in touch with the company. They'd

147

Bitsquatting Windows.com

Earlier this month, I came back around to seriously considering an attempt at bitsquatting. While the prior link goes into great depth on the topic, I will attempt to give a very high level overview here: If this sort of thing interests you: I tend to do stuff like this weekly. Give me a follow @_mattata

150

How does Google Authenticator work?

This post is the first in a three-part series. The remaining two: How does Google Authenticator work? (Part 2) How does Google Authenticator work? (Part 3) When you’re accessing services over the WEB – let’s pick GMail as an example – a couple of things have to happen upfront: The server you’re connecting to (GMail in…