Latacora

>>This gives the an amazing amount of "insider information" Couple this with a proof point that specialized teams like Latacora[1] are proving themselves out so they figure why not also get the inside scoop while turbo-charging their portfolio companies. [1] https://latacora.com/

Latacora | corpsec engineer | Remote | Full-time | https://www.latacora.com If working on security at a startup is appealing, here's an opportunity to work with a whole group of startups --- in health care, in financial services, in hardware, in transportation, in AI, and even in sports analytics. You'll be a member of a growing security team with multiple practice areas, working with security veterans, talented developers just getting their start in security, and with the engineering teams of a couple dozen startups. We're consultants, in a sense, but unlike any other consulting firm I'm aware of. Latacora builds security teams for startups. We work exclusively with startups; on average our clients are with us for 2.5 years and that number is trending up. During an engagement our whole team works on the client’s application security, cloud security, and corporate security. Once we've helped them build out a practice, we help our clients recruit someone full time to keep it running, and transition ourselves out. --- Latacora is hiring a senior Corporate Security (CorpSec) engineer to join our team and help our customers build their corporate security program to scale as they grow and address immediate threats ranging from phishing and ransomware to supply chain concerns. The Corporate Security (CorpSec) team helps growing startups with the security aspects of IT asset management, endpoint protection, mobile device management, and more, instilling solid best practices to…

Latacora | Full-Time | Chicagoland, NYC Metro | Startup Security Engineer Latacora builds and operates security teams for startups. Look at the startups hiring on this thread, and imagine running the security team for, like, a bunch of them simultaneously. That’s what we’re about. You’d want to be interested in that problem to make reading further worth your time. We’re currently 6 security-researcher software-developers. We find groups of startups with similar technical security challenges, and then automate and systematize. Everything that’s fun about application security — crawling through the ventilation ducts of software skyscrapers like John McClane, being a scary story told to baby software developers to keep them up at night — is fun about what we do. Mix in blue-team tooling, and that’s where we are. We’re hiring our first non-partner employee. Salaried, with benefits. Requirements: extremely interested in security, can code well in some language, willing to read and code in any language. Offices in Chicago and NYC (WFH fine, but we need to see you regularly). What we cannot promise: a clear job description, a refined hiring process. We’re figuring that stuff out now. What we can promise: honest and direct answers to serious inquiries regardless of your experience or perceived skill level. [email protected] https://www.latacora.com

I spent twelve years as a "security guy" before becoming employee #1 at a now-wildly-successful security startup five years ago. I've spent a lot of time in the last year "professionalizing" our security program, now that we've grown large enough to need repeatable security procedures. I am intimately familiar with the domain. Three things to segment the space: - Clients are typically driven by compliance or practical security value. Understanding who you cater to and qualifying your customers will save a lot of pain. - Many/most "pentesting" firms are focused on the corporate enterprise and IT people, not SaaS and dev people. Recognizing the difference in yourself and your customer needs will save a lot of pain. - Many/most of the traditional IT enterprise security best practices & tools do not apply to a well-managed SaaS platform. e.g., I do not need a traditional vuln scanner to check for unnecessary and vulnerable services when I have one domain that's terminated at an AWS ELB. Some industry color: - The 2013 Target compromise root cause was not Target themselves, but their HVAC contractor who maintained trusted access. As a result, third party vendor risk assessment is becoming "standard practice" during the procurement process of any technology vendor, including SaaS applications. - The vendor risk assessment teams expect all vendors to have mature security programs - SSAE-16 SOC2 audits, full Secure Development Lifecycle practices and customer-facing…

There's like, a whole section on https://www.latacora.com/blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem/#the-answers that's specifically recommendations. The only ones that are "corporate" are chat (where PGP's UX and security model are absolutely horrendous in ways that both prevent mass adoption and make it comically easy to screw up, and where most of those problems are nearly impossible to resolve in a federated system) and I guess backups, if we consider Colin Percival to be "corporate" when he puts on his tarsnap hat.

It's not new, and some people would disagree on some minor elements -- but a good place to start was regularly this blog from approximately Matasano/NCC Group members, called Cryptographic Right Answers [1]. It's very clear, gives straight forward answers in clear fashion -- and with multiple opinions often aligning. It was updated a few times, I wonder if the equivalent exists for PQ? Edit/Update: Found the PQ one @ [2], definitely check it out! Maybe I'm mis-remembering, but perhaps the most controversial element was the regular recommendation of AES-GCM. It certainly has excellent security properties, but also a certain brittleness re: nonces. [1] https://www.latacora.com/blog/2018/04/03/cryptographic-right-answers/ [2] https://www.latacora.com/blog/2024/07/29/crypto-right-answers-pq/

Another year, another critical parsing vulnerability in the PGP ecosystem. Latacora has an excellent post[1] that touches on the excessive complexity of PGP's encoding which, remarkably, probably isn't even in the top 3 things wrong with PGP. My personal favorite of these is when someone sent a weaponized compression packet to oss-sec in 2022[2]. [1]: https://www.latacora.com/blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem/ [2]: https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2022/q3/9

See also: https://www.latacora.com/blog/2024/07/29/crypto-right-answers-pq/ All the best, -HG

They published a followup to that article two months ago, and the correct answer in 2024 is still HMAC. https://www.latacora.com/blog/2024/07/29/crypto-right-answers-pq/

Recommended in here I believe: https://www.latacora.com/blog/2020/03/12/the-soc-starting/

A second layer of encryption would help, but I don't recommend PGP in particular. If you haven't heard, it has lots of problems and a lot of people recommend avoiding it (for example https://www.latacora.com/blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem/ / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20455780)

Yes, I subscribe to Daniel Stenberg's RSS feed and have seen his many articles bemoaning excessive classification of bugs as vulnerabilities. These bugs, however, show serious cryptographic deficiencies. Unfortunately there are a lot of cryptography amateurs making stuff without a proper understanding ond making grandiose claims, so my default stance is one of skepticism unless reputable cryptographers have looked at it. I use wormhole-william, the Go version of the Python magic wormhole, and age, mostly because of this Latacora endorsement: https://www.latacora.com/blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem/

Does Latacora count? Though I don’t know how big they are at the moment. https://latacora.com/

tptacek‘s Latacora security consultancy https://latacora.com/

> That leaves a massive gap that seems like an opportunity: YC startups Isn't Thomas last start up exactly about that? https://latacora.com/ > So what do you do if you want to create a startup to fill this gap? Make tools Indeed, I believe the only "tool" on the market for crypto reviews is cryptosense: https://cryptosense.com/ > I have an xss.txt file that contains exploits that work on almost every client I throw Can you share that :) ?

Right. I mean, if the website was simply letting you know about their talented Sec / DevOps team (something like https://latacora.com), sure nbd. A website like that tells me they're either (1) so talented fuck a website! I 10x'd this webpage in 19.3 seconds as a courtesy or (2) we are also bad at other things!. I don't know anything about Belitsoft, other than they have a blog written by two "Customer Success Managers" and 3 other dudes, and none of them use Chrome.

Clicking on his name [1] you can see he works at Latacora now [1]. Hopefully that helps answer your question [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek [2] https://latacora.com/

The only other thing I'm aware of is a brief note on Twitter that they're shutting down: https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/771533037666390017 (FWIW, the "more to come" has so far been about the Ptaceks' next project, which is apparently something focused on security needs of startups, in collaboration with Jeremy Rauch, with details still apparently in flux; contact details for those interested are at http://latacora.com)

- JWT algorithm is not configurable: good! - JWT Algorithm is RS512: uggh. Huge access tokens, slow validation AND bad security at the same time, boy we must be lucky. - Encrypted JWT when saving sensitive information in cookie? Good start... - ... Using Asymmetric encryption? Oh no... - RSA-OAEP: At least it's not PKCS#1.5 amirite? - Same RSA key is used for encryption and signature(?) Not great. - Stateful Access Tokens: well... I'm not sure how I feel about using stateful access tokens here at all. Since there is already a KV dependency, there are some advantages to storing stateful access tokens in the KV, most importantly you can easily revoke the tokens directly by deleting them. Revoking stateless tokens, on the other hand, is quite hard and not something that most web applications would care to implement. The most common trade-off (and indeed, half of the raison d'être for OAuth 2.0 refresh tokens) is to have a very short-lived (e.g. 5 minutes) stateless access token and a long-lived stateful refresh token (which OpenAUTH already does). Revocation would still come with some delay, but you won't be able to use an outdated token for a long time after the user logs out or changes password. This is an acceptable trade-off for many applications, but I'm not sure if it's right to offer it as the only solution in a software package that wants to be generic: many applications will have compliance requirements that could rule out accepting logged out session tokens…

There's a section in this post with proposed replacements: https://www.latacora.com/blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem/#the-answers I was also frustrated with this criticism in the past, but there are definitely some concrete alternatives provided for many use cases there. (But not just with one tool.)

https://www.latacora.com/blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem/#the-answers lists a bunch of them.

Another related writeup https://www.latacora.com/blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem/

Hell no. Email encryption should be left to rot. https://www.latacora.com/blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypted/

'tptacek has written about this earlier on HN. See https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&… For comparison, see also the section named Password handling in Cryptographic Right Answers: Post Quantum Edition https://www.latacora.com/blog/2024/07/29/crypto-right-answers-pq/

I think in general treating email any other way than "everyone will eventually read your mail" makes no sense. Email communication, from forwarding to how people archive, to copy-pasting provides no security and is so brittle, just assume anything you write in an email is for public consumption. Reminds me of a post from a few years ago about encrypted mail as a security LARP (https://www.latacora.com/blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypted/) If you want secure messaging that nobody else will snoop on use an application dedicated to.. secure messaging. It's never what email was for and it's not how it's being used.

That matches the advice from Latacora[1]. That advice makes a lot of sense from a security correctness and surface area perspective. There's a potential developer experience and efficiency concern, though. This likely forces two deserialization operations, and therefore two big memory copies, once for deserializing the envelope and once for deserializing the inner message. If we assume that most of the outer message is the inner message, and relatively little of it is the signature or MAC, then our extra memory copy is for almost the full length of the full message. [1]: https://www.latacora.com/blog/2019/07/24/how-not-to/

To say nothing of the fact that most people are not running their own email servers so that messaging is going to reside in places they don't own and the fact that relays get to read about everything exacerbating that problem, so you cannot really expect forward secrecy: Does this solve all the other problems with encrypted email, which is not widely used for a reason? Here's a discussion https://www.latacora.com/blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypted/

More generally, a MAC. You don't necessarily need one based on a hash. (Unrelated) see also the more recent https://www.latacora.com/blog/2018/04/03/cryptographic-right-answers/

There are multiple ways to define "private". Some of those can not be satisfied by any email service, but most don't, as email, by design, is not built for those use cases[0]. -- [0] https://www.latacora.com/blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypted/

There is a good technical essay (by experts) on why it's not possible in practice. https://www.latacora.com/blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypted/