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Technology

What are NFC cards and how are they protected?

Ever since I posted an initial article “Hack NFC Door Locks” I see a steady stream of people that come with queries like “what’s the protection of an NFC card” and “how do you hack a protected NFC card”. Obviously, there is something out there interesting enough for people to begin inquiring. What is an ...

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Password recovery mechanisms – Part 3

Passwords remain the main means of authentication on the internet. People often forget their passwords and then they have to recover their access to the website services through some kind of mechanism. We try to make that so-called “password recovery” simple and automated, of course. There are several ways to do it, all of them ...

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Password recovery mechanisms – Part 2

Passwords remain the main means of authentication on the internet. People often forget their passwords and then they have to recover their access to the website services through some kind of mechanism. We try to make that so-called “password recovery” simple and automated, of course. There are several ways to do it, all of them ...

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Password recovery mechanisms – Part 1

Passwords remain the main means of authentication on the internet. People often forget their passwords and then they have to recover their access to the website services through some kind of mechanism. We try to make that so-called “password recovery” simple and automated, of course. There are several ways to do it, all of them ...

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Cloud security

Let’s talk a little about the very popular subject nowadays – the so-called ‘cloud security’. Let’s determine what it is, what we are talking about, in fact, and see what may be special about it. ‘Cloud’ – what is it? Basically, the mainframes have been doing ‘cloud’ all along, for decades now. Cloud is simply ...

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Exodus from Java

Finally the news that I was subconsciously waiting for: the exodus of companies from Java has started. It does not come as a surprise at all. Java has never fulfilled the promises it had at the beginning. It did not provide any of the portability, security and ease of programming. I am only surprised it ...

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SAMATE Reference Dataset

Through the  news we can become alerted to many interesting things and one of the recent useful bits is the SAMATE Reference Dataset built by NIST Software Assurance Metrics And Tool Evaluation project. Should you need information on common vulnerabilities test cases, the database has more than 80,000 test cases by now. From the project ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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