Monday, 24th May 2010
Busting frame busting: a study of clickjacking vulnerabilities at popular sites (via) Fascinating and highly readable security paper from the Stanford Web Security Research group. Clickjacking can be mitigated using framebusting techniques, but it turns out that almost all of those techniques can be broken in various ways. Fun examples include double-nesting iframes so that the framebusting script overwrites the top-level frame rather than the whole window, and a devious attack against the IE and Chrome XSS filters which tricks them in to deleting the framebusting JavaScript by reflecting portions of it in the framed page’s URL. The authors suggest a new framebusting snippet that should be more effective, but sadly it relies on blanking out the whole page in CSS and making it visible again in JavaScript, making it inaccessible to browsers with JavaScript disabled.
What’s powering the Content API? The new Guardian Content API runs on Solr, scaled using EC2 and Solr replication and with a Scala web service layer sitting between Solr and the API’s end users.
doc/beatings.txt (via) Rubberhose is a disk encryption system developed by the founder of Wikileaks that implements deniable cryptography—different keys reveal different parts of the encrypted data, and it is impossible to prove that all of the keys have been divulged. Here, Julian Assange explains how this works with a scenario involving Alice and the Rubber-hose-squad.