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Latacora Blog
latacora.singles · Company blog · on HN since 2018
Security consulting firm Latacora writes about cryptography recommendations, PGP, SSH keys, Noise protocols and SOC2.
What HN saysHN commenters point to its Cryptographic Right Answers and PGP Problem posts as reliable guidance and list the blog among their favorites.
28HN people shared it
11linked it in comments
19stories submitted
1.5Kstory points
5 years agolast shared
2018people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Cryptographic Right Answers8 people · 342 points · first shared 2018 · 235 comments on HN
- 2Factoring the Noise protocol matrix3 people · 23 points · first shared 2018 · 3 comments on HN
- 3The PGP Problem3 people · 6 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 4The default OpenSSH key encryption is worse than plaintext2 people · 545 points · first shared 2018 · 256 comments on HN
- 5The SOC2 Starting Seven2 people · 109 points · first shared 2020 · 65 comments on HN
- 6Latacora: Factoring the Noise protocol matrix2 people · 17 points · first shared 2018 · 6 comments on HN
- 7Stop Using Encrypted Email2 people · 5 points · first shared 2020 · 1 comments on HN
- 8MacOS command line version of the WireGuard VPN is now available for testing1 people · 333 points · first shared 2018 · 193 comments on HN
- 9A Child’s Garden of Inter-Service Authentication Schemes1 people · 92 points · first shared 2018 · 52 comments on HN
- 10Gripes with Google Groups1 people · 34 points · first shared 2018 · 38 comments on HN
- 11ROCA vs. ROBOT: An Eternal Golden Braid1 people · 21 points · first shared 2018 · 8 comments on HN
- 12Dumb Security Questionnaires1 people · 5 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 13Loud subshells1 people · 2 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 14Analyzing a simple encryption scheme using GitHub SSH keys1 people · 1 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
toomuchtodo · 2020-08-11
Please consider some sort of access log for all activity around the secrets you’re managing, exposed to users in their account. Also consider a way to revoke all secrets/tokens at once with a privileged (MFA authorized) user action.
Best of luck, I think this product has a lot of value ahead based on the pain points addressed.
EDIT: This might also be of use before your SOC 2: https://latacora.singles/2020/03/12/the-soc-starting.html
zokier · 2019-10-03
Start from cryptographic right answers:
https://latacora.singles/2018/04/03/cryptographic-right-answers.html
On a glance none of those recommendations have become invalid in the passing 18 months or so.
CiPHPerCoder · 2019-08-30
Some sort of PAKE backed by U2F/WebAuthn would be worth considering.
PGP is not. https://latacora.singles/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem.html
Artemis2 · 2018-10-16
Some favorites of mine I haven’t seen mentioned:
https://blog.acolyer.org
https://jvns.ca
https://stratechery.com
https://blog.cloudflare.com
https://latacora.singles
https://www.schneier.com
https://www.ben-evans.com
plus an endless amount of newsletters…
kevin_nisbet · 2018-06-16
I would point you to latacora's updated recommendations about password handling: https://latacora.singles/2018/04/03/cryptographic-right-answers.html
Adding a salt and hashing a password is not something someone should be doing in 2018. Use scrypt, or another one of the recommended algorithms, as it is a complete implementation that is well researched and can be simply dropped into most systems.
And my response was in reference to how many password you should blacklist, which using a good algorithm is still feasible to brute force easy to guess passwords in an offline attack.
bigiain · 2018-04-10
In transit? Unless you know why you need something else - just use TLS. If you get to choose (as in - do not need to support WinXP/IE6/Android versions < 4.4) - select TLS1.2 with "safe/modern" cyphers.
Read the "website security" and "client server application security" sections of this and choose the advice closest to your project needs:
http://latacora.singles/2018/04/03/cryptographic-right-answers.html
and the discussion of that from last week:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16748400
The great advice there is "Let AWS AELB handle it for you".
chme · 2018-04-05
There seems to be an old version with expired letsencrypt certificates still running: https://latacora.singles
chupasaurus · 2021-05-13
That's why Cryptographic Right Answers [0] is a thing.
[0] https://latacora.singles/2018/04/03/cryptographic-right-answers.html
mjw1007 · 2019-03-16
I've always assumed that PuTTY used its own private key format because the OpenSSH one was terrible until about 2013.
See eg https://latacora.singles/2018/08/03/the-default-openssh.html (which is from 2018, but I think the weakness has been well known for a long time).
rakoo · 2018-06-06
http://latacora.singles/2018/04/03/cryptographic-right-answers.html
TL;DR: Use NaCl, or libsodium, or the go equivalent (https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/crypto/nacl).
FabHK · 2020-07-23
It wasn't in the scope of this audit, but it's still somewhat concerning... PBKDF2 with SHA-256 (a super fast hash with hardware support) as a key derivation function (which should be slow and difficult and hard to do in hardware)? That doesn't sound right. The answer provided (cross platform compatibility) doesn't sound satisfying.
Was this discussed with the prior audit?
EDIT to add: Here's the 2018 "cryptographically right answer" on password hashing ( https://latacora.singles/2018/04/03/cryptographic-right-answers.html ):
Password handling
Percival, 2009: scrypt or PBKDF2.
Ptacek, 2015: In order of preference, use scrypt, bcrypt, and then if nothing else is available PBKDF2.
Latacora, 2018: In order of preference, use scrypt, argon2, bcrypt, and then if nothing else is available PBKDF2.
You care about this if: you accept passwords from users or, anywhere in your system, have human-intelligible secret keys.
But, seriously: you can throw a dart at a wall to pick one of these. Technically, argon2 and scrypt are materially better than bcrypt, which is much better than PBKDF2. In practice, it mostly matters that you use a real secure password hash, and not as much which one you use.
Don’t build elaborate password-hash-agility schemes.
Avoid: SHA-3, naked SHA-2, SHA-1, MD5.
EDIT to UPDATE:
Bitwarden has commented (about an hour ago) that they'll fix this! Cool.
https://community.bitwarden.com/t/switch-to-argon2/350/23
https://github.com/bitwarden/jslib/issues/52