Tag: security

The Birth And Death Of Privacy: 3,000 Years of History Told Through 46 Images

“The Birth And Death Of Privacy: 3,000 Years of History Told Through 46 Images” is a rather extensive look at the history of privacy.

Privacy, as we understand it, is only about 150 years old.  Humans do have an instinctual desire for privacy. However, for 3,000 years, cultures have nearly always prioritized convenience and wealth over privacy.

I said “there is no such thing as privacy, and there never was” way too many times.  But I never had to go deep into the subject to defend it.  This article, on the other hand, does a much better job defending the argument than I ever cared to.

BeEF – Browser Exploitation Framework

BeEF is a browser exploitation framework.

BeEF is short for The Browser Exploitation Framework. It is a penetration testing tool that focuses on the web browser.

Amid growing concerns about web-borne attacks against clients, including mobile clients, BeEF allows the professional penetration tester to assess the actual security posture of a target environment by using client-side attack vectors. Unlike other security frameworks, BeEF looks past the hardened network perimeter and client system, and examines exploitability within the context of the one open door: the web browser. BeEF will hook one or more web browsers and use them as beachheads for launching directed command modules and further attacks against the system from within the browser context.

AWS Adds Descriptions to Security Group Rules

AWS Blog lets us know that Amazon has finally implemented one of the most useful features ever – descriptions on Security Groups rules.  Previously, one could provide a description to the Security Group only, for example: “Proxy Server Access”.  Which wasn’t very useful, as it was almost obvious.  But now one can add a description to every rule inside the Security Group.  So when you have a Security Group with a bunch of IP address ranges, you can now describe each one of them.  For example: “HQ Office”, “UK Office”, “Boss At Home”, etc.

The end of CSRF?

“The end of CSRF?” blog post talks about the new feature coming to browsers – SameSite cookie enforcement, which will help in getting rid of Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks.  Too bad this is currently only supported by Google Chrome (both desktop and mobile), and Opera.  But I’m sure it’s coming soon to the rest of the browsers.

Update:  It looks like the above blog post is almost a copy of this blog post, which has a number of useful comments.  Including this one, which links to a variety of projects and programming languages bug trackers requesting the support of the SameSite cookie feature.  Also, it looks like SameSite cookie is superseded by the Cookie Prefix solution, proposed by Google.

Secure Headers – a PHP library for easier management of browser security features

Modern browsers offer a variety of security mechanisms for web developers.  Unfortunately, some of these aren’t so easy to manage.  One needs a deep understanding of the functionality as well as theory behind.  Secure Headers is a library that makes all that work a lot easier for PHP developers.  Here are some of the features:

  • Add/remove and manage headers easily
  • Build a Content Security Policy, or combine multiple together
  • Content Security Policy analysis
  • Easy integeration with arbitrary frameworks (take a look at the HttpAdapter)
  • Protect incorrectly set cookies
  • Strict mode
  • Safe mode prevents accidental long-term self-DOS when using HSTS, or HPKP
  • Receive warnings about missing, or misconfigured security headers