Items tagged security, privacy
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Text Embeddings Reveal (Almost) As Much As Text. Embeddings of text—where a text string is converted into a fixed-number length array of floating point numbers—are demonstrably reversible: “a multi-step method that iteratively corrects and re-embeds text is able to recover 92% of 32-token text inputs exactly”.
This means that if you’re using a vector database for embeddings of private data you need to treat those embedding vectors with the same level of protection as the original text. # 8th January 2024, 5:22 am
Let websites framebust out of native apps (via) Adrian Holovaty makes a compelling case that it is Not OK that we allow native mobile apps to embed our websites in their own browsers, including the ability for them to modify and intercept those pages (it turned out today that Instagram injects extra JavaScript into pages loaded within the Instagram in-app browser). He compares this to frame-busting on the regular web, and proposes that the X-Frame-Options: DENY header which browsers support to prevent a page from being framed should be upgraded to apply to native embedded browsers as well.
I’m not convinced that reusing X-Frame-Options: DENY would be the best approach—I think it would break too many existing legitimate uses—but a similar option (or a similar header) specifically for native apps which causes pages to load in the native OS browser instead sounds like a fantastic idea to me. # 10th August 2022, 10:29 pm
Using achievement stats to estimate sales on steam (via) Really interesting data leak exploit here: Valve’s Steam API was showing the percentage of users that gained a specific achievement up to 16 decimal places—which inadvertently leaked their exact usage statistics, since if 0.012782207690179348 percent of players get an achievement the only possible input is 8 players out of 62,587. # 9th August 2018, 9:03 am
Protecting Against HSTS Abuse (via) Any web feature that can be used to persist information will eventually be used to build super-cookies. In this case it’s HSTS—a web feature that allows sites to tell browsers “in the future always load this domain over HTTPS even if the request specified HTTP”. The WebKit team caught this being exploited in the wild, by encoding a user identifier in binary across 32 separate sub domains. They have a couple of mitigations in place now—I expect other browser vendors will follow suit. # 19th March 2018, 10:21 pm
You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again (via) Flash cookies last longer than browser cookies and are harder to delete. Some services are sneakily “respawning” their cookies—if you clear the regular tracking cookie it will be reinstated from the Flash data next time you visit a page. # 17th August 2009, 3:23 pm
eval() Kerfuffle. The ability to read supposedly private variables in Firefox using a second argument to eval() will be removed in Firefox 3.1. # 2nd July 2008, 9:24 pm
Since 9/11, approximately three things have potentially improved airline security: reinforcing the cockpit doors, passengers realizing they have to fight back and—possibly—sky marshals. Everything else—all the security measures that affect privacy—is just security theater and a waste of effort.
— Bruce Schneier # 29th January 2008, 12:14 pm
Designing for a security breach
User account breaches are inevitable. We should take that in to account when designing our applications.
[... 545 words]non-consensual http user tracking using caches. Interesting security issue involving HTTP caching headers # 20th January 2004, 10:37 pm