Nov 15, 2014 A different kind of birthday attack Considering how many people actually use their birthday as their ATM pin, this is bad from a security standpoint.
Sep 07, 2014 Flaws of a single ecosystem The post is triggered by the recent leak of celebrity nude photos. Apple has claimed that the iCloud ecosystem is secure and the leak was the result of targeted attempts. Nevertheless, they eventually decided to tighten the security of the ecosystem. This is not an isolated incident as I ...
Jun 16, 2014 Problems with Distributed Architecture As reported here, a bitcoin mining pool has contributed 51% of total hashing output which theoretically allows them to double spend bitcoins or to deny other miner's transactions. I am not an expert at bitcoins but it appears that the distributed architecture is a crucial feature in ensuring ...
Jun 02, 2014 New Form of DDoS I was always hesitant to use pay-as-you-use services like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google App Engine for fear that the cost might spiral out of control if I turn out to be the target of a DDos attack. I did eventually try out app engine, but only because it was possible not to link a ...
May 21, 2014 Web Development in Singapore In light of the recent fiasco over the NDP website, I thought it would be apt for me to share my thoughts on how I believe web development in Singapore has ended up in this dismal state today. This is definitely not an isolated case, the series of breaches by Messiah last year being proof. Lack ...
May 08, 2014 How I (cheated and) won a quiz The quiz in question. In case anyone is not familiar with it. (attractive?) prizes to be won. A quick packet capture revealed that the questions could be found here in JSON format. This is what is looked like. Interesting that the answers were included even through "marking" was done only on ...
Mar 10, 2014 Immigration checks Earlier today, some MD of a security firm on channel new asia commented that it is impossible to check every single passport against the list of stolen passports due to the time needed to search the database. Such stringent checks would result in massive holdups at checkpoints. Therefore, apart ...
Feb 22, 2014 Encryption and blackmailing Just read something quite interesting here. Apparently, all the research put into mathematical algorithms is a double edged sword. Encryption can be used to deny the rightful owner access to his data. Fortunately, the attacker in this case made a mistake resulting in a 128 bit key that was ...