Matasano

Building things that people want is overrated. A person can derive great pleasure and satisfaction from ripping things apart instead. That's the gig we're offering. We work with some of the most interesting companies, along with lots of companies with interesting technology you've never heard of. This job has had me write compilers, learn Scala, reverse and interoperate with freaky network protocols, test chipsets, write hypervisors, extend debuggers, and crawl through the heating ducts and garbage chutes of several of the biggest web apps out there. It is a very cool gig. http://www.matasano.com And, I have news! Since last I posted this appeal, we've opened a Bay Area office. I'm hiring in NYC. I'm hiring in Chicago. And I'm hiring in SFBay. We're looking first and foremost for people who can code and who have a deep interest in software security. I've been thrilled with the quality of people I've gotten to talk to on HN. You can't possibly waste my time. My contact info is in my profile.

Sunnyvale, CA - Matasano Security [WILL RELOCATE] Matasano is an application security consulting firm. Our clients are the best companies --- and most of the largest of them. Our teams include some of the best researchers in the field. You can read more about our hiring process at http://www.matasano.com/careers. Put simply: we hire for aptitude, we respect and appreciate candidates, and we put real effort finding good fits. You can find out more by emailing <careers at matasano.com>. A human being who knows what they're talking about will talk to you. And I'd like to think we're fun to talk to! For some of the flavor of what we do, check out https://microcorruption.com/

I would strongly recommend the Matasano Crypto Challenge. By doing those you will answer your questions, learn as much math as you need, gain practical insights, and get as far as you choose. Here is someone's experience of it: https://blog.pinboard.in/2013/04/the_matasano_crypto_challenges/ It used to be here: http://matasano.com/articles/crypto-challenges/ Things have changed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7821028

Matasano: http://www.matasano.com/ It's a well-respected security firm that's been around for a long time.

He is not a 20 year old kid, by a long shot. http://www.matasano.com/#overview

Security audits and the like. tptacek is the founder of http://www.matasano.com/

FWIW, I found your post "Javascript Cryptography Considered Harmful" very helpful in understanding problems with client side crypto in the browser. I will recommend it to anyone who thinks it is safe: http://www.matasano.com/articles/javascript-cryptography/

The Matasano crypto challenges are a great place to start getting your feet wet and your hands dirty. http://www.matasano.com/articles/crypto-challenges/ Myself, I'm trying them in ANSI C

I have thought about a similar service but was dissuaded by various sources warning against the idea of using javascript with cryptography, e.g. http://www.matasano.com/articles/javascript-cryptography/. That's not to say a reasonable solution cannot be found, but there are a good number of issues that need to be addressed. The one that seems crippling to me is that the strength of javascript crypto libraries is questionable at best - nevermind the various other javscript attack vectors. A browser plugin could address some issues, but then that limits users to browsers with the plugin installed. Might as well have a native application where the quality of the cryptographic algorithms are more thoroughly tested at that point. Still, I like the idea and wish you the best of luck.

> There should just be a client side HTML5 drag and drop that encrypts files pre-transmission. The problem is that you'd be doing crypto in JavaScript. We're not currently at a point where that's viable: http://www.matasano.com/articles/javascript-cryptography/ Currently, if you want to securely transmit a document, you're pretty much stuck with learning and using something like PGP/GPG. Which is a pain for a lot of people, because there are new concepts to learn, software to install, and keyrings to manage. But it's the best we have right now.

Thought tptacek's link on Javascript crypto, linked to in the article (and sort of a motivator for the experiment), was well worth a read. http://www.matasano.com/articles/javascript-cryptography/

The Matasano crypto challenges ( http://www.matasano.com/articles/crypto-challenges/ ) are a great way to do this. Not by implementing crypto, but by breaking crypto in ways that will scare you away from ever implementing crypto.

What's the suggested method to securely exchange the key? It feels a bit like this is a step backwards in many ways. Being a non-webmail user, how can I benefit from this? If this were an implementation of SMIME/GPG it would be more widely adoptable since anyone with a compatible GMail plugin, desktop, or mobile client could use this. Edit: Good read about JS encryption and its downsides: http://www.matasano.com/articles/javascript-cryptography/

Unfortunately, I don't think so. It's pretty easy to eyeball your ciphertext and think it's sufficiently garbage-looking, but it's difficult to predict what an attacker can do with access to your running system. Seemingly innocuous flaws can lead to complete plaintext recovery or the ability to forge arbitrary ciphertext. (Here's a fun way to get a taste: http://www.matasano.com/articles/crypto-challenges/) @cperciva is right that cryptographic security is something that needs to be proven. Since I'm not smart enough to do that, I avoid designing my own crypto systems, and I recommend clients do the same. Lots of risk, little or no reward.

So? You guys wrote an article about it... http://www.matasano.com/articles/javascript-cryptography/ "SJCL is great work, but you can't use it securely in a browser for all the reasons we've given in this document. SJCL is also practically the only example of a trustworthy crypto library written in Javascript, and it's extremely young. The authors of SJCL themselves say, "Unfortunately, this is not as great as in desktop applications because it is not feasible to completely protect against code injection, malicious servers and side-channel attacks." That last example is a killer: what they're really saying is, "we don't know enough about Javascript runtimes to know whether we can securely host cryptography on them". Again, that's painful-but-tolerable in a server-side application, where you can always call out to native code as a workaround. It's death to a browser."

Amazingly enough, he does run a business. http://www.matasano.com/about/

To companies hiring: explain who you are and what you do, what you are looking for and what the hiring process is, extra points for a FAQ. Here's an excellent example: http://www.matasano.com/careers/

Confirm. This system was obviously designed by people who had no idea what they were doing, which is about the last thing you want in a cryptosystem. Failing to authenticate the JS cryptographic code (TLS would've helped here) makes this system effectively worthless and simple to MitM. A good read on the matter is Matasano's JavaScript Cryptography Considered Harmful: http://www.matasano.com/articles/javascript-cryptography/

I once started developing such a tool, but abandoned it when I understood the web browser is not a safe environment. You can't trust the javascript you execute: http://www.matasano.com/articles/javascript-cryptography/ For another example, imagine a security breach on the server, some malicious javascript code injected server side, and your passwords get leaked, without you noticing. If you think that you don't have to use SSL because you encrypt client side, think again. Without SSL a simple proxy can inject javascript in the page and get all your passwords. The best solution I think, which I haven't had the time to implement yet, is a native app, retrieving only encrypted and signed data from the server.

Matasano's careers page is the best I have ever seen. http://matasano.com/careers/

There's a great write-up of why doing cryptography in JavaScript isn't a good idea at http://www.matasano.com/articles/javascript-cryptography/. The browser is a very difficult environment to run your code in a trusted way.

Thanks for replying. Excellent choice on BouncyCastle and it never occurred to me the clever compilation to JS using GWT. With that said, why not use the OpenPGP (RFC 4880) support instead of PKCS#1? How about doing a ShowHN so we can get some more eyes on your new product? There are quite a few security folks here who can more adroitly chime in regarding the use of clientside JS. You may have seen this post as well, http://www.matasano.com/articles/javascript-cryptography/ , which was written by Thomas (user tptacek) who is quite active in participation here.

Those who are unaware of history are doomed to repeat it. I don't see even an attempt at mitigating the security issues inherent to in-browser, JavaScript cryptography: http://www.matasano.com/articles/javascript-cryptography/ (for the TL;DR crowd: there is no such thing as security when it comes to JavaScript running inside the browser, therefore, the crypto done in JS is not verifiable and not trustworthy, therefore worse than useless) In other words, this whole idea is completely insecure by design, and actively harmful by providing an illusion of security.

We actually have the code for JIT hardening already for Firefox, but we had some problems with Win32 that need investigation. If you want to follow along https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=677272. BTW much of this is similar to a study, but only about JIT security http://www.matasano.com/research/jit/.

ugh, I hate this kind of post because it does exactly what I mentioned above: creates more divisions than it actually describes. I'll just say your mention of FUD is ironic since last I checked, Mozilla's income from the google search referral contract was something like $80 million, which would make 20x that number $1.6 billion. I'd love to see your source on that one. You also clearly didn't bother to actually read any of the report. There are in fact serious security issues brought up there, have been brought up before [1], and are an active and interesting area of research. Mozilla and the other browser vendors are actively working on the issues brought up there (for instance, [2]), which no one has solved completely. But yes, please. Let's reduce this to soap opera and sound bites. [1] http://www.matasano.com/research/jit/ [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3337727

I'm not trying to be a twit here, but be fair to the site admins: say that after *.matasano.com works fully under https without any mixed-content warnings. E.g., http://www.matasano.com/ sources http://use.typekit.com/zpb4ovg.js. But there's no https://use.typekit.com. How are you going to fix that? It takes a village.

Great article! Chris Rohlf and myself gave a talk on attacking JIT engines at BlackHat earlier this year[1]. We covered JIT sprays and mitigating against them fairly thoroughly (not this thoroughly, but our goals were a bit different :)). Check it out if you're into this. [1] http://www.matasano.com/research/jit/

I said exactly one thing: Suggesting "a product has a narrow focus" == "a product is bad" is lame. I didn't compare Jottit to the iPod, I compared the number of features. There's a subtle difference. Also, sorry for the 'hominem, but it's people like you that turned Reddit into Digg. Keep your fucking language clean, your caps lock off, and your rhetorical questions to yourself, or get out. This is not Slashdot. It's really sad that you act like a total troll since you're an excellent hacker, judging by http://www.matasano.com/log/thomas-ptacek I know you have more to contribute to News.YC than your ego and your snarky remarks. Try harder.

~-,._.,-~'`^`'~-,._.,-~'`^`'~-,._.,-~'`^`'~-,._.,-~'`^`'~-,._.,-~ MATASANO SECURITY - Chicago. New York City. Sunnyvale. Application Security Consultant Full-Time, work visa sponsorship available ~-,._.,-~'`^`'~-,._.,-~'`^`'~-,._.,-~'`^`'~-,._.,-~'`^`'~-,._.,-~ The security of computer systems has increasingly become an everyday concern. The news all too often brings word of yet another compromise, exposing financial information, personal details, or simply salacious pictures. Whatever the impact, it's clear the technology industry has a problem, and there are few easy solutions. Some seek legislation to impose harsher penalties on the responsible parties. This ignores the fact that many of those responsible are outside the jurisdictions which seek to punish them. In some cases, they may have tacit approval of their own government, or even be operating on their government's behalf. Others turn to established security products looking for antivirus and network filtering technologies to add protection. This is an also an imperfect solution. It places the defender in a reactive posture, responding only to those threats which have been previously detected, and for which countermeasures have been developed. There's no perfect solutions. At Matasano, we believe the best way to combat security weaknesses is at their source; by discovering and remediating software vulnerabilities before others leverage them for ill effect. Our clients see the value in this approach. …

You are discriminating ... if you are hiring for a job that requires javascript and don't hire people who don't know it. Is that a bad thing? I dont' think so. You might be overlooking good coworkers or employees, especially older ones who have experience in other languages. I knew zero Python or Javascript before I started this job, and now write in it 100% of the time. (My previous job was Lisp + GWT.) Similarly, I recall an article from Matasano that said that some of their best candiates did not have prior experience with something that one might have expected to be a prerequisite: "Some of the best testers we've worked with didn't have a formal security background." [0]. If you only hire people who "know" $Language, what will you do if six months down the line you decide to rewrite in Clojure, or find that Haskell is the best way to move forward? 0: http://matasano.com/careers/