So, someone submitted a 'bug' to Mozilla.

As some of you may know, in the next year, the new mass surveillance law in the Netherlands is going into effect.

Another fun fact is that the dutch security agencies/government have their own CA (Certificate Authority) for SSL/TLS certificates.

The new law says that the AIVD (dutch NSA/GCHQ equivilant) is allowed to hack into systems through obtained certificates and also that they're allowed to INTERCEPT TRAFFIC THROUGH OBTAINED PRIVATE SSL/TLS KEYS.

So someone actually had the fucking balls to submit a fucking issue to Mozilla saying that the Dutch State certs shouldn't be accepted anymore when the new mass surveillance law gets into place.

This person deservers a fucking medal if you ask me.

It feels stupid to see a simple google dork returning the list of your mistakes.

A US senator or judge or whatever his title is said today that he wants companies/governments to build a 'responsible encryption' system.

Preferably that would exist out of a big ass database which stores the private keys of citizens so in case a person loses their private key or the government needs access to encrypted content, that is possible.

NOO, WHAT COULD FUCKING POSSIBLY GO WRONG!?!?!

Seriously those kind of people should not be allowed to have the kind of positions they have.

This shit makes me so angry.

Dear outsourced developers. Don't send me your private SSH key by email. I don't need it, it allows me to access anything else you can access pretending I'm you, and it shows a misunderstanding of how SSH keys work. 🤦🏻‍♂️

we had this guy once, who we gave access to our private repo. everything's all good until we noticed that our amazon bill was USD 8,000+!!! we found out that lots of servers got created and that's bec. this guy forked our private repo and his fork was a public one. our keys were still not in .env files and were part of the commit so some bot got hold of it and accessed our amazon account. we suspected that the servers were used for bitcoin mining. anyway guy was fired on the spot and we also learned our lesson to keep keys out of repos.

Following a conversation with a fellow devRanter this came to my mind ago, happened a year or two ago I think.

Was searching for an online note taking app which also provided open source end to end encryption.

After searching for a while I found something that looked alright (do not remember the URL/site too badly). They used pretty good open source JS crypto libraries so it seemed very good!

Then I noticed that the site itself did NOT ran SSL (putting the https:// in front of the site name resulted in site not found or something similar).

Went to the Q/A section because that's really weird.

Saw the answer to that question:

"Since the notes are end to end encrypted client side anyways, we don't see the point in adding SSL. It's secure enough this way".

😵

I emailed them right away explaing that any party inbetween their server(s) and the browser could do anything with the request (includingt the cryptographic JS code) so they should start going onto SSL very very fast.

Too badly I never received a reply.

People, if you ever work with client side crypto, ALWAYS use SSL. Also with valid certs!

The NSA for example has this thing known as the 'Quantum Insert' attack which they can deploy worldwide which basically is an attack where they detect requests being made to servers and reply quickly with their own version of that code which is very probably backdoored.

This attack cannot be performed if you use SSL! (of course only if they don't have your private keys but lets assume that for now)
Luckily Fox-IT (formerly Dutch cyber security company) wrote a Snort (Intrustion Detection System) module for detecting this attack.

Anyways, Always use SSL if you do anything at all with crypto/sensitive data! Actually, always use it but at the very LEAST really do it when you process the mentioned above!

I think I will ship a free open-source messenger with end-to-end encryption soon.

With zero maintenance cost, it’ll be awesome to watch it grow and become popular or remain unknown and become an everlasting portfolio project.

So I created Heroku account with free NodeJS dyno ($0/mo), set up UptimeRobot for it to not fall asleep ($0/mo), plugged in MongoDB (around 700mb for free) and Redis for api rate limiting (30 mb of ram for free, enough if I’m going to purge the whole database each three seconds, and there’ll be only api hit counters), set up GitHub auto deployment.

So, backend will be in nodejs, cryptico will manage private/public keys stuff, express will be responsible for api, I also decided to plug in Helmet and Sqreen, just to be sure.

Actual data will be stored in mongo, rate limit counters – in redis.

Frontend will probably be implemented in React, hosted for free at GitHub pages. I also can attach a custom domain there, let’s see if I can attach it to Freenom garbage.

So, here we go, starting up modern nosql-nodejs-react application completely for free.

If it blasts off, I’m moving to Clojure + Cassandra for backend.

And the last thing. It’ll be end-to-end encrypted. That means if it blasts off, it will probably attract evil russian government. They’ll want me to give him keys. It’ll be impossible, you know. But they doesn’t accept that answer. So if I accidentally stop posting there, please tell my girl that I love her and I’m probably dead or captured

So I am running this crypto project that has dynamically generated private keys for a wallet stored in a Redis database. Nowhere else. The keys are generated on the fly.

At the moment of the happening the wallet had over 3.000 USD on it. I am testing new code locally, supposedly on a local Redis DB. Of a sudden, my code wipes the crypto keys and it turns out that I was connected to the live instance. 😱 Better don't ask me how.

Shock of my life. You know, when you turn pale and dark in your eyes, blood stops in your veins and you just want to die? Worst-case scenario that could have happened. All that money lost in crypto space.

Turns out, my good Redis hosting company kept backups for the past 7 days. Keys restored. Happiest moment of my life.

Hey there!

So during my internship I learned a lot about Linux, Docker and servers and I recently switched from a shared hosting to my own VPS. On this VPS I currently have one nginx server running that serves a static ReactJs application. This is temponarily, I SFTP-ed the build files to the server and added a config file for ssl, ciphers and dhparams. I plan to change it later to a nextjs application with a ci/di pipeline etc. I also added a 'runuser' that owns the /srv/web directory in which the webserver files are located. Ssh has passwords disabled and my private keys have passphrases.

Now that I it's been running for a few days I noticed a lot of requests from botnets that tried to access phpmyadmin and adminpanels on my server which gave me quite a scare. Luckily my website does not have a backend and I would never expose phpmyadmin like that if I did have it.

Now my question is:
Do you guys know any good articles or have tips and tricks for securing my server and future projects? Are there any good practices that I should absolutely read and follow? (Like not exposing server details etc., php version, rate limiting). I really want to move forward with my quest for knowledge and feel like I should have a good basis when it comes to managing a server, especially with the current privacy laws in place.

Thanks in advance for enduring my rant and infodump 😅

How the hell does PR containing production secrets and private keys gets 3 approvals and gets merged upstream? 😬 🥴

So at the old job, i needed support for an issue relating to Amazon S3. We used a third party Python plugin for sending files to our buckets, but had some pretty severe performance issues when trying a 2-way sync.
Naturally, I sought help on StackOverflow, and was asked to share my config. Without much thought, I pasted the config file.
Next comment made me aware that our API id and key was listed in this config (pretty rediculous to keep such private info in the same file as configuration, but oh well).
I edited my question and removed the keys, and did not think about the fact that revisions are stored.

Two weeks later, my boss asks me if I know why the Amazon bill is for 25.000$ when it used to be <100$ 😳

I've never been so scared in my life. Luckily, Amazon was nice enough to waive the entire fee, and I leaned a little about protecting vital information

Microsoft owns github
Microsoft owns windows
Microsoft owns powershell

Why then, why exactly, is it so fucking hard to get ssh private keys for github, up and running on windows powershell.

I tried to change permissions on files but then it broke the git-bash implementation 😭.

Fuck it !! 😭😭

Fuck you windows 10. Fuck you private keys. Fuck you tortoise git. Fuck you git bash. Fuck you cygwin. Want 3x hours of my life back. Had an auth problem... Had to reinstall all the above on windows to connect to my private repo. Took me 5 minutes to connect after reinstalling all the tools. Grrrrrrr. And I'll never know why it wouldn't connect apart from fatal protocol error: bad line length character..I tried ever stack overflow answer... I nearly bricked my gitlab CE...and it was windows being a motherslut

When I think "the fundamental problem", the closest thing that comes to my mind is "unsolvable problem". P =/!= NP is a fundamental problem, the theory of everything is a fundamental problem.

But we actually solved at least one such problem – the fundamental problem of cryptography.

The problem was "how to establish a secure connection over a non-secure channel?" Like you can't exchange the key, it'll be exposed by definition.

We solved it with a simple yet brilliant solution of asymmetrical cypher, that thing with public and private keys.

It's fascinating to think that people died in WW2 over this, there were special operations to deliver fresh deciphering keys securely and now SSH and HTTPS are no-brainers that literally everyone use.

*sets up digital ocean droplet
*adds ssh keys, enables private networking, hooks it into everything else
*adds roots in pycharm
*realizes I forgot to set it up with the one click app I wanted
*destroys droplet
*repeat

If I want to set up a vpn tunnel in a network to securely transfer files between android devices connected to the network , what can i do ?
A kali os is responsible for destributing public, private keys.

Tried to use wireguard for that but the apk wont support file transfer.

Thanks

Tarball of source code from a big manufacturer served on their open src page...
They forgot to delete the .git subdir!
Private keys and signing tools for everybody!!!!

P.S It's fixed by now, don't get your hopes up :P

Very eventful day, please see enclosed several smaller rants.

===================

My college's systems are shit and not only do they use HTTP for everything, even the stores and financial aid purchase system, they have homebrew JS shit for PGP site encryption (nifty...), but they exchange the PRIVATE KEYS instead of the public keys. Over HTTP. Not even HTTPS. Also if you log in more than 10 times in 24 hours it's supposed to lock you out of your account until you call... except it locks EVERYONE out. Found this out when on campus, trying to get my textbooks, when suddenly everyone had login lockouts because i'm a "paranoid bastard" and "afraid of idiot college students" for not telling a PUBLIC PC to remember the one password (enforced by password auto-sync across all their shit, not ideal, no) guarding my SUPER-SENSITIVE FINANCIAL AND ACADEMIC DATA... among the other hundreds of issues this college has. I now see why this college is the only one I can afford...

===================

Can't pass-through raw DVD drive access to VMs as VM managers crash when I try (yes, even QEMU...) so i've gotta install Windows on a shitty 80GB laptop HDD for literally one quick project. On the bright side, if my theory proves correct, you'll no longer need modchips for PS2s.

===================

Found a couple odd lines in my xscreensaver config:

GetViewPortIsFullOfLies:False
nice: 10
pointerHysteresis: 10

the first 2 I can't seem to figure out what do, and the last taught me a new word. Fun!

===================

that's it, it's over, why are you still here

I've finally found a goldmine of accurate job listings that don't include Windows shit-administration... So I'm thinking of sending out applications to all of them. Problem is, as you might recall from my previous rants, I had a flash drive with my GPG keypair on it stolen from me. I still haven't fully replaced the key (I made another one and published it but I'm not using it yet), and because I'm fairly confident that this flash drive's data has never been used (so likely just plugged into Windows and formatted), it's unlikely that I'm gonna bother rotating all of the contents that were on that flash drive.

That said however, my emails now all have signatures underneath them as follows:
Met vriendelijke groet / Best regards,
[my name]

- My outbound email is usually signed with my private key. If not, please don't hesitate to ask me about it through a different communication platform.

IMPORTANT: My keys have possibly been compromised. An encrypted flash drive on which this GPG keypair was stored has been stolen from me. I'm in the process of phasing out and replacing this key. Please do not use it to encrypt any emails to me anymore.

Not entirely sure whether I should remove or keep that last bit. As a potential employer, would you see this as a red flag (he's got encrypted data stolen from him, wtf that's incompetent), or as a nice thing to know that it was properly disclosed (so no secrecy around potential data breaches)? Both seem equally likely so I'm a bit confused about what I should do.

Storing private keys for code signing on SVN.

Set-up a 5 node EC2 cluster in AWS; Install my dependencies on all; Add private keys between all for handshake; Submit my Hadoop job for processing; AWS closes my instance within 10 minutes of starting a job that took me almost half an hour to set-up because the master node's spot costs have reached more than 15 USD :(

Sooooooo…. The other day I committed a change with this message:

“Committing the ultimate sin in committing secret keys again however this repo is and will always be private and my pis will be hidden on my network so it shouuuuuuld be fine... right...”

A long time ago you sent me an email with the subject 'I love you', I then got so excited that I forwarded the letter to all my contacts, and they forwarded it too.. I can't describe the words for the feelings I had back then for you. I felt into love with you, really. But there were always troubling moments for me.

For example when 'Code Red' showed up and found your backdoor. Man I was pissed at that time. I didn't know what to do next. But things settled, and we found each other again.

And then that other time when this girl named 'Melissa' was sending me some passwords to pr0n sites, I couldn't resist. She was really awesome, but you know, deep in my heart that was not what I wanted. I somehow managed to go back to you and say sorry. We even moved together in our first flat, and later in our own house. That was a really good time, I love to think back at those moments.

Then my friend 'Sasser' came over to us one night, do you remember how he claimed that big shelf in our living room, and overflooded it with his own stuff, so that we haven't a clue we are reading yet offshelve? Wow that was a disturbing experience.

But a really hard time has come when our dog 'Zeus' got kicked by this ugly trojan horse. I really don't want go into details how the mess looked like after we discovered him on our floor. Still, I am very sorry for him that he didn't survived it :(

Some months later this guy named 'Conficker' showed up one day. I shitted my pants when I discovered that he guessed my password on my computer and got access to all my private stuff on it. He even tried to find some network shares of us with our photos on it. God, I was happy that he didn't got access to the pics we stored there. Never thought that our homemade photos are not secure there.

We lived our lives together, we were happy until that day when you started the war. 'Stuxnet..'! you cried directly in my face, 'you are gonna blow up our centrifuges of our life', and yeah she was right. I was in a real bad mood that days back then. I even not tried to hide my anger. But really, I don't know why all this could happen. All I know is, that it started with that cool USB stick I found on the stairs of our house. After that I don't remember anything, as it is just erased from my memory.

The years were passing. And I say the truth here, we were not able to manage the mess of our relationship. But I still loved you when you opened me that you will leave. My 'Heartbleed' started immediately, you stabbed it where it causes the most pain, where I thought that my keys to your heart are secured. But no, you stabbed even harder.

Because not long after that you even encrypted our private photos on our NAS, and now I am really finished, no memory which can be refreshed with a look at our pictures, and you even want my money. I really 'WannaCry' now...

fellow dev thought he was being clever, hiding his private ssh keys inside image files on a public web server...

In today's episode of "how i got almost to the point of insanity for hours and the sudden realization and relief"

When you have ssh error saying your private key is an invalid format in your CI, you probably just missed an EOL.

MCP says EOL.

Fucking EOL

That is the realization i made after half a day wasting on debugging this.

#justAthought

I was reading about public and private keys yesterday, and i had a thought: don't you think the concept of "username" is being so badly misused?

It can act as a great firewall, but we are just misusing it as an alternative to "login via email", because we are now so dumb to remember our email.
You might think of my rant as being going back in time, but think about this: my profile shows the name titanlannister. if someone got access to my password, he/she can immediately take over my complete identity because devrant allows us to login via username/password combo.

Now think of this: my username shows titanlannister. Anyone of you can write a post and mention me via @titanlannister, and this system will notify me. However even if you get my password, you are unable to hack into my profile, because my profile is only accessible via my email id/password combo, which you still don't know.

This, I would call as Platform Public Key which adds a kind of semi firewall over default public/private key combination .

What do you think?

My phone got stuck in funky restart boot loop yesterday. The first 2 restarts was odd but after 3 cycles, I started panicking. Went on my PC, googled for all kinds of button combinations of power button, volume button, back button, and home button to get into fastboot, recovery and safe mode to see if I can clear stuff or at least get backup of my stuff. I also tried taking the battery out. Nothing works, except when I factory reset.

Everything was new again and as it booted up, I have to remember to change my authentication keys in LastPass, my private ssh key in Krypt. But fortunately, Google remembered all my apps and suggested if I wanted to install them again since it recognized my phone was an old phone. Thanks for tracking me Google. And now since its a reset, everything is clean, no cache, cookie, and some of my music files are all gone. Well at least its fast like before.

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TL;DR Does Telegram really secure?

Some people say Telegram is the most secure and safe messenger, some say it's not. If you're familiar with it you may know from news that Telegram did not gave its clients' info to government, you may have heard that Telegram's encryption is not the best one, BUT my question is does it store peoples' private chats' keys? Actually it does with normal chats because if you reinstall Telegram you can easily get normal chats' messages. Also my friend said that any application in mobile stores like App Store sign a agreement with stores owner company that if some points met, the application owner have to share info of its clients. So dear friend what do you think, should I continue using Telegram)?

P.S. sorry for my not the best English

The only way I can edit Puppet config files is by git. And the only way I can git pull/push/commit/etc is generating a ssh key with a private key and give my public key to my supervisor to the git server (wherever that may be).

Because I'm on Windows 10 and screwed up my installers, I completely forgot to backup my ssh keys before resetting it. FML

My friend said I should make some of my old dead projects public (after removing passwords or api keys) even if they were badly done at least to show growth and development to recruiters.

I don't know though, I had a ton of random projects most I didn't bother with good practices assuming I'd be the only person to see the code, or telling myself I'd fix it later though eventually letting the project die for various reasons

should I really make bad projects public or should I keep them private waiting for a slim possibility of me reviving them.

Quantum computing will break BTC private keys soon?

Maybe 2022?

Well Now I can decrypt Evil corps data !
FYI - if you mail to Elliot Alderson, you might be lucky 😉

Started to value digital properties over material ones.
Examples:
- Own code / Git-Repos
- Own software / apps
- Crisp images
- Open source software
- Private keys equal to real ones 😉

What keyboard macros do you guys use when you have programmable function keys?

Also a funny little story that I just remembered. My brother used to have a key that would type his password cause he was THAT fucking lazy. He was writing an NPC for a private Ragnarok Online server that I was testing with a couple people. Apparently he had hit that function key in the middle of an announcement command.

So basically, everything went as planned, but then while announcing an event, it would announce his password to THE ENTIRE SERVER. Lucky for him, there were only three of us online at the time, and we told him as soon as it happened.

Q.14 - Suppose that R sends a msg 'm' which is digitally signed to M and the pair of private and public keys for M and R be denoted as K(x)- and K(x)+ for x=R,M respectively. Let K(x)(m) represent the encryption of 'm' with a key K(x) and H(m) is the message digest. Which of the following is the way of sending the msg 'm' along with the digital signature to M?
A. [m, K(R)+(H(m))]
B. [m, K(R)-(H(m))]
C. [m, K(M)-(H(m))]
D. [m, K(A)+(m)]
E. WOW, REALLY ?

I've been working for so long with API integrations and one part of that is security. We perform ssl key exchanges for 2-way verification and a large percent of those partners provides me with their own pkcs12 file which contains their private and public keys! What's the sense of the exchange!? I think they just implement it just to boast that they "know" how ssl works,

So as a personal project for work I decided to start data logging facility variables, it's something that we might need to pickup at some point in the future so decided to take the initiative since I'm the new guy.
I setup some basic current loop sensors are things like gas line pressures for bulk nitrogen and compressed air but decided to go with a more advanced system for logging the temperature and humidity in the labs. These sensors come with 'software' it's a web site you host internally. Cool so I just need to build a simple web server to run these PoE sensors. No big deal right, it's just an IIS service. Months after ordering Server 2019 though SSC I get 4 activation codes 2 MAK and 2 KMS. I won the lottery now i just have to download the server 2019 retail ISO and... Won't take the keys. Back to purchasing, "oh I can download that for you, what key is yours". Um... I dunno you sent me 4 Can I just get the link, "well you have to have a login". Ok what building are you in I'll drive over with a USB key (hoping there on the same campus), "the download keeps stopping, I'll contact the IT service in your building". a week later I get an install ISO and still no one knows that key is mine. Local IT service suggests it's probably a MAK key since I originally got a quote for a retail copy and we don't run a KMS server on the network I'm using for testing. We'll doesn't windows reject all 4 keys then proceed to register with a non-existent KMS server on the network I'm using for testing. Great so now this server that is supposed to connected to a private network for the sensors and use the second NIC for an internet connection has to be connected to the old network that I'm using for testing because that's where the KMS server seems to be. Ok no big deal the old network has internet except the powers that be want to migrate everything to the new more secure network but I still need to be connected to the KMS server because they sent me the wrong key. So I'm up to three network cards and some of my basic sensors are running on yet another network and I want to migrate the management software to this hardware to have all my data logging in one system. I had to label the Ethernet ports so I could hand over the hardware for certification and security scans.

So at this point I have my system running with a couple sensors setup with static IP's because I haven't had time to setup the DNS for the private network the sensors run on. Local IT goes to install McAfee and can't because it isn't compatible with anything after 1809 or later, I get a message back that " we only support up to 1709" I point out that it's server 2019, "Oh yeah, let me ask about that" a bunch of back and forth ensues and finally Local IT get's a version of McAfee that will install, runs security scan again i get a message back. " There are two high risk issues on your server", my blood pressure is getting high as well. The risks there looking at McAfee versions are out of date and windows Defender is disabled (because of McAfee).

There's a low risk issue as well, something relating to the DNS service I didn't fully setup. I tell local IT just disable it for now, then think we'll heck I'll remote in and do it. Nope can't remote into my server, oh they renamed it well that's lot going to stay that way but whatever oh here's the IP they assigned it, nope cant remote in no privileges. Ok so I run up three flights of stairs to local IT before they leave for the day log into my server yup RDP is enabled, odd but whatever let's delete the DNS role for now, nope you don't have admin privileges. Now I'm really getting displeased, I can;t have admin privileges on the network you want me to use to support the service on a system you can't support and I'm supposed to believe you can migrate the life safety systems you want us to move. I'm using my system to prove that the 2FA system works, at this rate I'm going to have 2FA access to a completely worthless broken system in a few years. good thing I rebuilt the whole server in a VM I'm planning to deploy before I get the official one back. I'm skipping a lot of the ridiculous back and forth conversations because the more I think about it the more irritated I get.

“Just a quick fix” Classic start to a reported ticket. Ticket states that a form field was not doing anything.

Think to myself ok this sounds like a nice easy one for the morning. A few hours later I find something like the following written by a senior member of the dev team.

SearchClass {
//...list of getter and setters

Private $snakeCaseName;

SearchFunction() {
Foreach($this as $property => $value){
//... if property keys = string for each object property then do code

If($property == “snakecaseProperty”){
//...do stuff
}
}
}
}

Why does this loop exist!!!!! All it does is remove any error checking if a getter method is misspelt...

To make matters worse the entire search method was over 300 lines building a MySQL query string.... even though there was an ORM and entity classes available!!!