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Age verification is incompatible with the internet
The recent move among U.S. states to add digital “age verification” to websites which serve adult content is a troubling one. Digital age verification systems are rife with privacy concerns, many requiring you to upload your government ID to third-party vendors or even directly to the website in question. Privacy…
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Why it's hard to trust software, but you mostly have to anyway
My long-time collaborator Richard Barnes [1] used to say that "in security, trust is a four letter word" , and yet the dominant experience of using any software-based system—which is, you know, pretty much anything electronic—is trusting the manufacturer. Not only is there no meaningful way to determine what software…
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Modern Wardriving (2023)
Let’s start by defining the word Wardriving: it is the search for WIFI wireless networks from a vehicle equipped with a computer. This would be the classic definition. I define modern wardriving as the search for WIFI networks, Bluetooth devices … Continue reading →
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A beginner's guide to constant-time cryptography (2017)
For programmers new to cryptography, there are plenty of “known unknowns” – unfamiliar terms like “elliptic curves” and “random oracles”, and unnecessarily long acronyms (“RSASSA-PKCS-v1_5”, like really?). But what really gives cryptography its reputation is the unknown unknowns. The things that catch even experienced…
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Baiting the bot
LLM chatbots can be engaged in endless "conversations" by considerably simpler text generation bots. This has some interesting implications.
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Decompiling Hyper-V Manager to rebuild it from source
This post guides through decompiling Hyper-V Manager to rebuild it from source, aiming to assess its value for potential open-sourcing. It explores manual and automated decompilation processes, including troubleshooting and enhancing the tool, advocating for community-led improvements to this widely-used but neglected…
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0x01 – Killing Windows Kernel Mitigations
This post was made possible through hard work and determination. Do not feel frustrated if this stuff does not click immediately and remember, the source of truth will always be the source code. For us, our source code is raw assembly. That said it’s important you understand these techniques in detail because when…
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Converting untrusted PDFs into trusted ones: The Qubes Way (2013)
Arguably one of the biggest challenges for desktop security is how to handle those overly complex PDFs, DOCs, and similar files, that are so often exchange...
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Deterministic Quoting: Making LLMs safer for healthcare
LLMs have the potential to revolutionise our field of healthcare, but the fear and reality of hallucinations prevent adoption in most applications.
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Why Your Wi-Fi Router Doubles as an Apple AirTag
Apple and the satellite-based broadband service Starlink each recently took steps to address new research into the potential security and privacy implications of how their services geo-locate devices. Researchers from the University of Maryland say they relied on publicly available data from Apple to track the…
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TIL: Some surprising code execution sources in bash
I ran across two surprising sources of code execution in bash (and probably other shells) recently.
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Exploiting McDonald's APIs to hijack deliveries and order food for a penny
A series of API flaws in McDelivery India made it possible to order food for a penny, hijack other people’s delivery orders, view user information, and more.
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SQL Injection Isn't Dead: Smuggling Queries at the Protocol Level
PDF slides from a presentation by Paul Gerste at DEF CON 32. It turns out some databases have vulnerabilities in their binary protocols that can be exploited by carefully crafted …
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I Built an Ld_preload Worm
Teenagers' hands are the devil's playthings.
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PSA: Internet Archive "glitch" deletes years of user data and accounts
Recently at Internet Archive a “glitch” (their choice of word) deleted a great many accounts, including my account that had been at archive.org/details/@ging...
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Becoming physically immune to brute-force attacks (2021)
Using thermal physics, cosmology, and computer science to calculate password vulnerability to the biggest possible brute-force attack.
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Looking into the Nintendo Alarmo
While everyone was waiting on news for the successor of the Nintendo Switch, Nintendo released the Alarmo. A small plastic alarm clock that ...
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Apple Silicon MacBook batteries can't be replaced under warranty by third party
I bought a new M1 MacBook Pro in April 2022. A little over two years later, I'm seeing a service recommended message, and the maximum capacity of the battery is now down to 78%. Admittedly, my MacBook Pro experiences heavy usage: basically all day, every day. The batteries in my previous 2014 Intel MacBook Pro, which…
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Why CISA Is Warning CISOs About a Breach at Sisense
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said today it is investigating a breach at business intelligence company Sisense , whose products are designed to allow companies to view the status of multiple third-party online services in a single dashboard. CISA urged all Sisense customers to reset…
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Ten years isn't long enough for maximum age settings
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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How to Create HTML/ZIP/PNG Polyglot Files
Learn How to Create HTML/ZIP/PNG Polyglot Files!
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Stark Industries Solutions: An Iron Hammer in the Cloud
Two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, a large, mysterious new Internet hosting firm called Stark Industries Solutions materialized and quickly became the epicenter of massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on government and commercial targets in Ukraine and Europe. An investigation…
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Law Enforcement Undermines Tor
Few weeks ago, the German political magazine Panorama and STRG_F reported that law enforcement agencies infiltrated the Tor network in order to expose criminals. The reporters had access to documents showing four successful deanonymizations. I was given the chance to review some documents. In this post, I am…
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Narrative Jailbreaking for Fun and Profit
Posted on Monday 23 Dec 2024. 1,634 words, 1 link. By Matt Webb.