News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

croikle

Re:What's the matter with PGP? on Wednesday August 13, 2014 @10:13PM (#8175773)
I'm aware of simple brute-force attacks on short key IDs [0], which are just the last 32 bits of the fingerprint (e.g. 438CF0E2). With significant effort, one might be able to extend that to 64 bits.

I'd be much more surprised by a full fingerprint match. Wouldn't that imply a SHA-1 collision?

[0] http://www.asheesh.org/note/debian/short-key-ids-are-bad-new...

Re:What's the matter with PGP? on Wednesday August 13, 2014 @09:58PM (#8175750)
I believe it's Certificate Transparency, a Google project for globally monitoring SSL certificates.

http://www.certificate-transparency.org/

Re:Combatting illegal abuses of ngrok on Saturday May 31, 2014 @12:30AM (#7825279)
Is there any protection from trolls sending mail to this address? Yes, one can roll back the change, but an automated attack would win.

Perhaps the address should be an unguessable <GUID>@ngrok.org instead? Or do you validate SPF and only accept mail from your ISP?

(Maybe you already have solutions; I just found it interesting to consider abuse of the system.)

Re:Isotopic 256 on Thursday April 17, 2014 @11:52PM (#7607876)
Yeah, the way the rules work magnesium is a dead-end. You have to double-oxygen to get to silicon, and then it's smooth sailing. (Note that all implemented reactions are listed if you scroll down)
Re:Can the Bloomberg Terminal be "Toppled"? on Wednesday March 19, 2014 @09:17PM (#7433150)
> For instance try finding out what stocks and weights make up the Russell 2000 index

This actually sounds like a fun little linear algebra problem.

Seems to work for me. I opened the Flash Player preference pane and discovered that it had already updated to 12.0.0.70.
Re:About the security content of iOS 7.0.6 on Friday February 21, 2014 @09:50PM (#7280790)
So, I'm not sure about that one. Apparently s_client ignores the error and completes the connection because it's intended to be used for debugging.

> Currently the verify operation continues after errors so all the problems with a certificate chain can be seen. As a side effect the connection will never fail due to a server certificate verify failure.

https://www.openssl.org/docs/apps/s_client.html

https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg71...

Yeah, I'm not sure. The linked diagram [1] shows them influencing routing, rather than some timing issue.

[1] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/785152-166819124-mit...

Re:Xfinity WiFi Home Hotspot FAQs on Sunday October 27, 2013 @11:18PM (#6624911)
Bufferbloat on the upstream pipe, if somebody is using your shared connection.
Re:The Navy’s newest warship is powered by Linux on Friday October 18, 2013 @10:20PM (#6575087)
One license offered for Phil Rogaway's OCB block-cipher mode explicitly prohibits military use. (although, as I read it, the military could use still open source implementations under the other license)

http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/ocb/license.htm

Re:Contrary to public claims, Apple can read your iMessages on Thursday October 17, 2013 @10:20PM (#6569429)
Even disregarding Apple's control over the software, the system depends on Apple as a trusted key distributor. This is the vulnerability which the article is concerned with, as far as I can tell.
Re:Time-lock encryption on Monday October 07, 2013 @11:38PM (#6512904)
It's a cute idea, but you have 1/r^4 intensity scaling, which is prohibitive even at lunar distance. The lunar ranging experiments receive "one photon every few seconds" [1]. You could probably do better with bigger equipment, higher power, and perhaps an orbiting base station to skip the atmosphere, but the numbers are going to win before too long.

An active repeater would give you 1/r^2, though. For example, you could ping Voyager I for a 36-hour delay. However, that's likely not feasible at light-year distances, let alone the problem of getting the devices there. :)

[1] http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=605

Re:Fingerprints and Passwords: A Guide for Non-Security Experts on Wednesday September 11, 2013 @01:42AM (#6365733)
> Apple claims that even with access to the device, a nine digit passcode would take 2.5 years to brute force.

That's 2.5 iPhone-years of computation, though. A speedy desktop could be 10 times as fast, and that's before we get to GPUs or multiple machines.

Re:Spooks break most Internet crypto, but how? on Saturday September 07, 2013 @07:56PM (#6347171)
Chrome's pinning is a definite upgrade, but it's more vulnerable than some people make it seem. In practice, a pin consists of a list of CA certificates which are allowed to sign for the given domain (the list is in [1]). This list can be surprisingly long: for example, the list for twitter.com contains 22 keys from 3 different CAs.

This means that, e.g., if you are "good friends" with Verisign, you can get them to issue a certificate for any Google property, and Chrome will happily accept it.

[1] https://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/net/http/tr...

Re:Spooks break most Internet crypto, but how? on Saturday September 07, 2013 @07:21PM (#6347022)
No. You cannot outsource your random number generation unless you have an ultimately trusted third party. The important thing is that nobody knows your random numbers. After all, random.org could be malicious or compromised, too.
Re:Speed Up Git Pull on Saturday September 07, 2013 @12:21AM (#6343962)
In fact, even better: you can add forwarding to your existing connection. <newline>~C opens a command line, which accepts the following commands:

    ssh> help
    Commands:
      -L[bind_address:]port:host:hostport    Request local forward
      -R[bind_address:]port:host:hostport    Request remote forward
      -D[bind_address:]port                  Request dynamic forward
      -KR[bind_address:]port                 Cancel remote forward
(If you're not familiar with them, some of the other escape sequences are useful too. ~? lists them all.)

[EDIT] Apparently, if you have a recent enough version, you can add a forward to the master with `ssh -O forward ...` [1]

[1] http://serverfault.com/questions/237688/adding-port-forwardi...

Re:Speed Up Git Pull on Thursday September 05, 2013 @09:03PM (#6338133)
You can skip the master and spawn a fresh connection for your tunnel using `-o ControlPath=none`.
s/prevent/mildly discourage
Re:A Tour Inside CloudFlare's Latest Generation Servers on Monday July 22, 2013 @03:12PM (#6085851)
To be fair, at 10 gigabits that buffer is only 12.5 ms, but given their dedication to latency I can see it being worth investigating.
This flight was a month ago, and was briefly discussed here [0]. Video of the winning flight is available [1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5884266

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syJq10EQkog

This sort of thing is used, e.g. [0]. It collects entropy at a limited rate, though, so for demanding applications (SSL servers, say) you want dedicated hardware: [1], [2].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_random_number_generat...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RdRand

[2]: http://www.entropykey.co.uk/

Re:DecryptoCat on Friday July 05, 2013 @01:05AM (#5993513)
Note that it's possible to convert your keys to use PBKDF2: http://martin.kleppmann.com/2013/05/24/improving-security-of...
Re:When Are the Intelligent Aliens? on Monday July 01, 2013 @03:07PM (#5972884)
Or perhaps the best move is to hide. With such a large range of time, almost any species you encounter will be either incredibly primitive (thus not so interesting, and not receptive to your signals), or tremendously advanced, and a serious existential threat. Faced with this choice, it's quite rational to avoid looking for the neighbors.

This doesn't really apply to the self-replication wave, but it is an argument against active SETI.

Re:Practicing privacy: Encryption on Monday July 01, 2013 @03:41AM (#5969272)
I'm a fan of Diceware. Strong entropy guarantees and memorable passwords.
Re:A Dark Room - minimalist text-based game on Saturday June 29, 2013 @01:09AM (#5961551)
Don't worry about it. Actually, you get meat & fur from that event, so it's not terrible.
Re:A Dark Room - minimalist text-based game on Saturday June 29, 2013 @12:43AM (#5961520)
Warning: while the first part of the game works fine in a touch-based interface, a later section requires a keyboard. You'll be annoyingly unable to proceed on a touchscreen.

Older »