Top all-time · #1576
Eric Rescorla
Personal blog · educatedguesswork.orgsecurityweb
Eric Rescorla writes Educated Guesswork, a personal blog at educatedguesswork.org about security and web. Since 2007, 48 different Hacker News readers have linked it 140 times, most often “Understanding Memory Management, Part 3: C++ Smart Pointers”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-26, and you can follow it by feed.
Most-linked posts?
- Understanding Memory Management, Part 3: C++ Smart Pointers4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-03-10
- DNS Security, Part III: Dane and the WebPKI3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-12-28
- Maybe someday we'll be able to search the Web privately3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-10-02
- Overloaded fields and you: from plane seats to Fnu Lnu to TLS to null pointers3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-08-20
- Understanding Memory Management, Part 5: Fighting with Rust3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-04-20
- Understanding Memory Management, Part 2: C++ and RAII3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-02-18
- Security impact of the Rizzo/Duong CBC "BEAST" attack 3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-09-24
- Understanding Memory Management, Part 6: Basic Garbage Collection3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-05-26
- Private Access Tokens, also not great3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-08-29
- Understanding Memory Management, Part 4: Rust Ownership and Borrowing3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-03-31
What Hacker News says?
Presumably, because they built the first client-side CSAM scanning technology. Random article about it: https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/apple-csam-intro/
Comment linking /posts/apple-csam-intro/
on “UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16”Submitted How to hide your IP address as a story · 260 points
HN discussionHere's a summary of how their proposed system was supposed to work: https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/apple-csam-intro/ (if you want to skim it, search for mentions of "manual review" and "visual derivative") I suspect the key would be that there'd be a team verifying that something is actually child pornography, because the system is a perceptual hash rather than a strict comparing-bytes so before someone looks a…
Comment linking /posts/apple-csam-intro/
on “Apple removes references to CSAM from its child safety webpage”Submitted Understanding Memory Management, Part 1: C as a story · 237 points
HN discussionIt's not happening, for multiple reasons. https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/dns-security-dane/ Reasons not to DNSSEC? The biggest one is that it exposes you to misconfigurations that happen routinely even at large sites (because DNSSEC is hard to manage), for no actual security benefit. The "no actual benefit" part is my big reason, though. DNSSEC is pure path-dependence; people do it because they think they shoul…
Comment linking /posts/dns-security-dane/
on “Why might you run your own DNS server?”Submitted Understanding Memory Management, Part 5: Fighting with Rust as a story · 147 points
HN discussionAuthor here. Quite so. See footnote 3: https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/memory-management-1/#fn3 "If you know you're going to be doing a lot of reallocation like this, many people will themselves overallocate, for instance by doubling the size of the buffer every time they are asked for more space than is available, thus reducing the number of times they need to actually reallocate. I've avoided this kind of tric…
Comment linking /posts/memory-management-1/
on “Understanding Memory Management, Part 1: C”Submitted Why it's hard to trust software, but you mostly have to anyway as a story · 119 points
HN discussionIt took me a little time, but here's a hopefully readable description of how it works: https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/ipa-overview/
Comment linking /posts/ipa-overview/
on “Privacy preserving attribution for advertising”Submitted Challenges in building a decentralized web as a story · 74 points
HN discussionAndroid does same-provider auto-upgrade if it determines that the recursive supports DoH (last I checked, if it's on Google's list). However, this means that unless you configure your own resolver, you're vulnerable to whoever controls the network substituting their own resolver. Firefox uses a set of vetted and pre-specified resolvers ("trusted recursive resolvers"), so is less vulnerable to this form of attack. I…
Comment linking /posts/dns-security-dox/
on “Firefox 143 for Android to introduce DoH”Submitted Understanding Memory Management, Part 2: C++ and RAII as a story · 40 points
HN discussionhttps://educatedguesswork.org/posts/dns-security-adox/
Comment linking /posts/dns-security-adox/
on “Google Public DNS's approach to fight against cache poisoning attacks”Submitted First Impressions of Bluesky's at Protocol as a story · 33 points
HN discussionThe problem with hand counting is that it scales very poorly. Specifically, the cost of hand counting is the product of the number of ballots times the number of contests on each ballot. US elections tend to have a very large number of contests, which makes the counting very slow. [0] Even with the California 1% manual tally this can take weeks [1] It's true that most of the world does hand counting, but most of the…
Comment linking /posts/voting-hcpb/
on “Half of America's Voting Machines Are Now Owned by a MAGA Oligarch”Submitted End-to-End Encryption and Messaging Interoperability as a story · 33 points
HN discussionIt's important to understand why one might care about trusting the zone's content. From the perspective of something like a browser, the mapping from the domain name to the IP address (i.e., the A or AAAA records) need not be secured via DNS because the connection to the server is secured via TLS and the WebPKI. So DNSSEC isn't helping here, especially because the clients don't check DNSSEC, so it doesn't protect th…
Comment linking /posts/dns-security-dane/
on “Just one bad packet can bring down a vulnerable DNS server thanks to DNSSEC”Submitted DNS Security, Part IV: Transport Security for DNS (DoT, DoH, DoQ) as a story · 26 points
HN discussionIt's not just WebRTC. Basically, if you want things to work when both endpoints are behind typical NATs (a very common situation), you need some kind of signaling system. There are several reasons for this: - NAT bindings are usually not stable over long periods of time - Many NATs implement what's basically a stateful inspection firewall, which means that you actually need to send a packet out to the peer's address…
Comment linking /posts/nat-part-1/
on “Sharedrop: Easy P2P file transfer powered by WebRTC – inspired by Apple AirDrop”Submitted End-to-End Encryption and Messaging Interoperability as a story · 19 points
HN discussionDo you mean on HN or in real elections? In real elections, the situation is actually quite complicated depending on where you live. Specifically: - Many people vote on paper with hand counting, which is of course not digital. - Many people vote on paper with machine counting, which is straightforwardly auditable. - Many people vote on Direct Recording Electronic (touchscreen) machines. Some of these have paper trail…
Comment linking /tags/voting/
on “Announcing a16z crypto research”Submitted One does not simply destroy a nuclear weapon as a story · 17 points
HN discussionOne of the working group members did an in depth look at the proposal that I thought was fairly even-handed: http://www.educatedguesswork.org/2012/08/initial_notes_on_mi... > WebRTC itself is so young that a complete rewrite shouldn't be out of consideration if needed. Nobody wants to carry bad decisions over the years anymore. That's partly true, but also one of the traps of discussing these things outside of the w…
Comment linking /2012/08/initial_notes_on_microsofts_cu.html
on “Microsoft goes its own way with Web audio/video spec, despite W3C rebuff”Submitted Boeing 787 control and in-cabin entertainment networks are/were connected (2008) as a story · 10 points
HN discussionThe author of that blog has an interesting write up on that same topic. https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/web5-first-impressions/
Comment linking /posts/web5-first-impressions/
on “Challenges in building a decentralized web”Submitted Understanding Memory Management, Part 7: Advanced Garbage Collection as a story · 9 points
HN discussionYou copied it from http://www.educatedguesswork.org/2011/09/security_impact_of_...
Comment linking /2011/09/security_impact_of_the_rizzodu.html
on “Chrome and the BEAST”Submitted Understanding Memory Management, Part 6: Basic Garbage Collection as a story · 9 points
HN discussionThis one is from Eric Rescorla, a coauthor of many of the recent TLS RFCs: http://www.educatedguesswork.org/2011/09/security_impact_of_...
Comment linking /2011/09/security_impact_of_the_rizzodu.html
on “Chrome and the BEAST”Submitted First Impressions of Web5 as a story · 7 points
HN discussion
