• #security on software development security and web security, security best practices and discussions, break-ins and countermeasures. Everything you ever wanted to know about software security but were afraid to ask, for fear of not understanding the answer!

Albert Zenkoff Post list

On the utility of technical security

It is often said that the system is only as strong as the weakest link. When you have good security and strong passwords, the weakest link will be the human. As has always been. Think of how the system can be recovered from a breach when the problem is not technical but human. [youtube=http://youtu.be/W50L4UPfWsg]

Read More

Security by …

We know several common buzzwords for determining security strategy of a company (or an individual). Let’s try to define them once again, for completeness sake. Security by ignorance Easily summed up by “what you do not know cannot hurt you” and is obviously wrong. Typically happens at the early stages of software developer’s career when ...

Read More
Your password is not long enough

Common passwords blacklist

Any system that implements password authentication must check whether the passwords are not too common. Every system faces the brute-force attacks that try one or another list of most common password (and usually succeed, by the way). The system must have a capability to slow down an attacker by any means available: slowing down system ...

Read More

Hack NFC Door Locks

I can see in the logs that people sometimes come to this site with interesting searches. A recent interesting search was “Hack NFC Door Locks”. Well, since there is interest in the subject, why not? Let’s talk about NFC, contactless smart card and RFID door locks, shall we not? The actual technology used for the ...

Read More

Quantitative analysis of faults shows that…

Not to worry, we are not going to get overly scientific here. I happened across this extremely interesting paper called “Quantitative analysis of faults and failures in a complex software system” published by Norman Fenton and Niclas Ohlsson in ye god old year 2000. The paper is very much worth a read, so if you ...

Read More
What part of "NO" don't you understand?

Cryptography: just do not!

Software developers regularly attempt to create new encryption and hashing algorithms, usually to speed up things. There is only one answer one can give in this respect: Here is a short summary of reasons why you should never meddle in cryptography. Cryptography is mathematics, very advanced mathematics There are only a few good cryptographers and ...

Read More

Supply chain: Huawei and ZTE

US House of Representatives published an interesting report about their concerns with Huawei and ZTE, large Chinese telecom equipment providers. The report states openly that there are concerns that the equipment, parts and software may be manipulated by the Chinese government agencies, or on their behalf, in order to conduct military, state and business intelligence. ...

Read More

The Elderwood Report

Symantec reports very interesting findings in their report of the so-called “Elderwood Project”. A highly interesting paper that I can recommend as bedside reading. Here is a teaser: In 2009, Google was attacked by a group using the Hydraq (Aurora) Trojan horse. Symantec has monitored this group’s activities for the last three years as they ...

Read More

SHA-3 is there!

NIST has announced the end of the Secure Hash Algorithm competition the day before yesterday, naming Keccak as the winner and making it the SHA-3 algorithm. The complete announcement from NIST is here. One thing of note is that since the algorithm was developed by STMicroelectronics and NXP Semiconductors, the algorithm is heavily optimized for ...

Read More

IEEE should be embarrassed

“The world’s largest professional association for the advancement of technology” has been thoroughly embarrassed in an accident where they left their log files containing user names and passwords open for FTP access to all on the Net for more than a month, according to a DarkReading report. Or, at least, I think they should be ...

Read More
Copyright © Holy Hash! All Rights Reserved.