October 9, 2024

Bitcoin hacks and thefts: The underlying reason

Emin Gün Sirer has a fascinating post about how the use of NoSQL caused technical failures that led to the demise of Bitcoin exchanges Flexcoin and Poloniex. But these are only the latest in a long line of hacks of exchanges, other services, and individuals; a wide variety of bugs have been implicated. This suggests […]

Heartbleed and passwords: don't panic

The Heartbleed bug has captured public attention this week like few security vulnerabilities before it. This is a good thing, as indeed this is a catastrophic flaw. Many people have focused on its impact on passwords with headlines like “Security Flaw Exposes Millions Of Passwords” and “Change these passwords right now.” Heartbleed certainly could have been used […]

Heartsick about Heartbleed

Ed Felten provides good advice on this blog about what to do in the wake of Heartbleed, and I’ve read some good technical discussions of the technical problem (see this for a particularly understandable explanation). Update Apr 11: To understand what Heartbleed is all about, see XKCD. Best. Explanation. Ever. In this brief posting, I […]

How to protect yourself from Heartbleed

The Heartbleed vulnerability is one of the worst Internet security problems we have seen. I’ll be writing more about what we can learn from Heartbleed and the response to it. For now, here is a quick checklist of what you can do to protect yourself.

Cookies that give you away: The surveillance implications of web tracking

[Today we have another announcement of an exciting new research paper. Undergraduate Dillon Reisman, for his senior thesis, applied our web measurement platform to study some timely questions. -Arvind Narayanan] Over the past three months we’ve learnt that NSA uses third-party tracking cookies for surveillance (1, 2). These cookies, provided by a third-party advertising or analytics network […]