Best of 2021

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2021. 553 posts.

Systems & Performance
95

The compiler will optimize that away

A lot of programmers believe that compilers are magic black boxes in which you put your messy code in and get a nice optimized binary out. The hallway philosophers will often start a debate on which language features or compiler flags to use in order to capture the full power of the compiler’s magic. If you have ever…

109

Escaping VirtualBox 6.1: Part 1

This post is about a VirtualBox escape for the latest currently available version (VirtualBox 6.1.16 on Windows). The vulnerabilities were discovered and exploited by our team Sauercl0ud as part of the RealWorld CTF 2020/2021. The vulnerability was known to the organizers, requires the guest to be able to insert…