cryptologie.net

After messing around with this code for about a month I decided to write this up for the tubes in the hope that I can save some souls. I have come to the conclusion that OpenSSL is equivalent to monkeys throwing feces at the wall. It is, bar none, the worst library I have ever worked with. I can not believe that the internet is running on such a ridiculous complex and gratuitously stupid piece of code. Since circa 1998 the whole world has been trusting their secure communications to this impenetrable morass that calls itself the “OpenSSL” project. I bet that the doctors that work on that shitshow can not prescribe anything useful either!

worrying essay, read it here: https://www.peereboom.us/assl/assl/html/openssl.html

We have tested some of our own services from attacker’s perspective. We attacked ourselves from outside, without leaving a trace. Without using any privileged information or credentials we were able steal from ourselves the secret keys used for our X.509 certificates, user names and passwords, instant messages, emails and business critical documents and communication.

A pretty bad bug has been found in open SSL during the Codenomicon. more info here: http://heartbleed.com/

List of vulnerable websites from the Alexa top 10,000 websites: https://gist.github.com/dberkholz/10169691

You can test a website here: http://filippo.io/Heartbleed/

And also, if you have a lot of time to waste, this random dude seems to know a lot about it :D

A great article from AskAmathematician about true randomness.

The question is actually geared towards physicists and the tl;dr is: true randomness exists. Take that causality believers.

And as I expected, the experience to prove this is done with photons:

http://www.askamathematician.com/2009/12/q-do-physicists-really-believe-in-true-randomness/

I just gave a talk about bitcoins at my uni, here are the slides

Some people from Stanford are planning to build an anonymous market place. As Silk Road as shown, such a project can only fall with time unless it is decentralized. With all the new ideas and technologies coming into place (in protocols such as bitcoins, namecoins (for dns)), they are thinking of applying them for a decentralized market place as well.

More info here: https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2014-March/013304.html

And a new github repo to watch out for!

https://github.com/goshakkk/decentralized-anonymous-marketplace-concept

They say that this wireless security system might now be breached with relative ease by a malicious attack on a network. They suggest that it is now a matter of urgency that security experts and programmers work together to remove the vulnerabilities in WPA2

it is the de-authentication step in the wireless setup that represents a much more accessible entry point for an intruder with the appropriate hacking tools. As part of their purported security protocols routers using WPA2 must reconnect and re-authenticate devices periodically and share a new key each time.

In the meantime, users should continue to use the strongest encryption protocol available with the most complex password and to limit access to known devices via MAC address.

http://sciencespot.co.uk/wpa2-wireless-security-cracked.html

1. they allowed “file://” to be fetched from their servers when they should have restricted it to “http(s)://”

2. they were using servers that were part of a network to do some private stuff, didn’t filter those ips, people on the same network could perform those tasks.

http://engineering.prezi.com/blog/2014/03/24/prezi-got-pwned-a-tale-of-responsible-disclosure/

The editor I’m using the most is Sublime Text 3. It’s just super easy to use and super useful when you combine it with the right plugins and snippets.

But I love switching editors. I’ve used Frontpage, Dreamweaver, PHP Designer, Netbeans, Notepad++… and others I can’t remember. I’ve recently tried the beta of Light Table and Brackets (that is truly amazing!), and I am eagerly waiting for Atom the open source IDE of github.

I also love spending time with Emacs. It’s hard to master but I dig the “you don’t need a mouse” aspect. One thing I found really annoying though is that most software use Vim by default. Wanting to master emacs, I didn’t want to spend time learning Vim as well and I started tweaking the settings so that software X would use emacs by default. And that works well until… But then you run into some complications, for example I’m still trying to figure out how to do a git diff with emacs, or you run into a machine without emacs, and then it’s either nano, which is shitty, or something else that is installed on the machine… and vim is (almost?) always installed by default.

So I decided to just learn Vim. And it was actually easier than it sounded and I feel like I’m going to avoid a lot of headaches now. Sometimes it’s better to learn and adapt rather than try to use our own tools.

And if you’re like me, you’ll actually have a lot of fun learning vim :)

I run into a lot of great reads these days, so let me share one more with you,

Jean-Baptiste Quéru tries to explain how deep it goes when you just query google.com in your browser.

https://plus.google.com/+JeanBaptisteQueru/posts/dfydM2Cnepe

…At least for now.

This shows how unnecessary encrypting is sometimes. Some people like to encrypt and encrypt everything, and don’t consider a solution “usable” if it not fully protected.

I’d argue that twitter has always been a very “public” and “exhibitionist” kind of websites where the private messages have never been a core feature (and it’s actually not a really well done message system) and no user is obviously going to use it for “serious” matters. So why spend time encrypting it ?

http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/19/5523656/twitter-gives-up-on-encrypting-direct-messages-at-least-for-now