Top all-time · #2453
Matt Blaze
Personal blog · mattblaze.org/blogsecurityscience
Matt Blaze's personal blog at mattblaze.org covers security and science. Since 2018, 31 different Hacker News readers have linked it 39 times, most often “Testing Phone-Sized Faraday Bags”. The last post was in 2022, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (19) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Matt Blaze's posts and papers on physical lock security and master keys, Faraday cage shielding, P25 radio encryption weaknesses, and numbers-station analysis.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 19 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Testing Phone-Sized Faraday Bags7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2021-12-02
- Did a broken random number generator in Cuba help expose an espionage network? (2020)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-09-18
- Rights Amplification in Master-Keyed Mechanical Locks (2003) [pdf]4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-08-01
- /papers/p25sec.pdf2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-09-08
- /blog/copywrongs2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-05-29
What Hacker News says?
This reminded me of Matt Blaze's work on physical lock security back in 2003. He found a method of deriving the "master key" for a building (one key that opens all locks) from a single example: https://www.mattblaze.org/masterkey.html When he published about this he was bombarded with messages from locksmiths complaining that they all knew about this and kept it secret for a reason! https://www.mattblaze.org/papers/…
Comment linking /papers/kiss.html
on “10M people watched a YouTuber shim a lock; the lock company sued him – bad idea”Submitted Testing Phone-Sized Faraday Bags as a story · 368 points
HN discussionAs far back as 2011, Matt Blaze was pushing for changes to the copyright policies of IEEE and ACM. http://www.mattblaze.org/blog/copywrongs
Comment linking /blog/copywrongs
on “Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal”Submitted Rights Amplification in Master-Keyed Mechanical Locks (2003) [pdf] as a story · 46 points
HN discussionhttps://www.mattblaze.org/blog/faraday/ Make of that what you want
Comment linking /blog/faraday/
on “Globalstar SEC filing, Apple to use 85% of its satellite network capacity”Submitted Did a broken random number generator in Cuba help expose an espionage network? (2020) as a story · 45 points
HN discussionPolice dispatch might be encrypted but not very well. https://www.mattblaze.org/blog/p25 It's actually worse than clear text radio in many ways. All cellphone call meta data and all SMSes are recorded, so while it avoids people listening in scanners and the public record it isn't very confidential. It's police using WhatsApp and Signal that will cause big problems.
Comment linking /blog/p25
on “Hundreds arrested as crime chat network cracked”Submitted The Cryptography of Orphan Annie and Captain Midnight as a story · 38 points
HN discussionWhile definitely better than the non-encryption of CTCSS etc, P25 encryption has some relatively concerning implementation problems. It's possible none of these actually matter for your usecase as many are related to UX around configuring and using encryption in an institutional setting, but the unauthenticated traffic injection, induced transmission and jamming issues are, well, not great no matter how you look at…
Comment linking /papers/p25sec.pdf
on “Flipper Zero Gets Major Firmware Update, Can Eavesdrop on Walkie-Talkies”Submitted Safecracking for the computer scientist (2004) [pdf] as a story · 36 points
HN discussionThe pre-print loophole is exploited by people who publish in IEEE (electrical engineering) and ACM (computer science) which require assigining exclusive rights to the final article but not the final pre-print. After the final article is accepted but before publication a new clone is put up on their personal website with the name “final pre-print”. It’s understood in these two fields in these two journals that IF the…
Comment linking /blog/copywrongs
on “Two major research funders to bar grantees from publishing in hybrid journals”Submitted Did a broken random number generator in Cuba help expose a Russian spy network? as a story · 31 points
HN discussionCorrection: that's the lock on the GTE clone of the Western Electric payphone. The actual Western Electric version used an unusual lever lock. The later variant, the 30C, is claimed to have never been picked. That's a really good lock design. It's simple, robust, and immune to standard picking techniques. But there is a vulnerability. The blocking wedge, which is only supposed to move along one axis, has some mechan…
Comment linking /photos/misc/wecolock/
on “The 'pay phone bandit' who baffled the FBI in the '80s”Submitted A Cryptologic Mystery as a story · 6 points
HN discussionAnd his recording of the Cuban numbers station, if you want to hear what these sound like: https://www.mattblaze.org/private/17435khz-200810041700.mp3 Here's a sample of the referenced "Linconshire Poacher": https://priyom.org/media/247818/e3.mp3
Comment linking /private/17435khz-200810041700.mp3
on “Modern-day spying: sometimes old technology is more secure”Submitted Safecracking for the computer scientist (2004) [pdf] as a story · 4 points
HN discussionMatt Blaze's analysis of the flawed OTPs used by Cuban numbers stations: https://www.mattblaze.org/blog/neinnines/
Comment linking /blog/neinnines/
on “Modern-day spying: sometimes old technology is more secure”Submitted How Law Enforcement Tracks Cellular Phones (2013) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe domain name itself is a pretty good investment too, I imagine. It used to belong to a professor I had in college, and I remember reading his tweets over the year or two before the sale about how many inquiries he had been getting for it: https://www.mattblaze.org/blog/newaddress
Comment linking /blog/newaddress
on “The economics of stadium names”Submitted A Cryptologic Mystery as a story · 3 points
HN discussionMatt Blaze is still around. I get the feeling he doesn't post often: https://www.mattblaze.org/blog/
Comment linking /blog/
on “Neal Stephenson responds with wit and humor (2004)”Submitted Locks and Security by Matt Blaze as a story · 2 points
HN discussionA traditional FM walkie-talkie, yes, passive, but a P25/DMR handheld radio, especially operating in trunked mode, not necessarily. One notorious example of this is P25's use of packet retransmission requests: https://www.mattblaze.org/papers/p25sec.pdf A lot of worksite-oriented handheld radios these days are not just oldschool FM and use digital protocols to efficiently manage bandwidth, which can involve transmitt…
Comment linking /papers/p25sec.pdf
on “Beirut airport bans pagers, walkie-talkies on all flights”Submitted Matt Blaze’s Testimony at Hearing on Cybersecurity of Voting Machines [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29413774 https://www.mattblaze.org/blog/faraday/
Comment linking /blog/faraday/
on “Father who used a signal jammer to keep his kids offline at night faces jail”Submitted Rights Amplification in Master-Keyed Mechanical Locks [pdf] as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSee https://www.mattblaze.org/blog/faraday/ : > At least in the frequency ranges I tested, two commercial Faraday pouches (the EDEC OffGrid and Mission Darkness Window pouches) yielded excellent performance sufficient to provide assurance of signal isolation under most real-world circumstances.
Comment linking /blog/faraday/
on “Father who used a signal jammer to keep his kids offline at night faces jail”Submitted Cryptology and Physical Security (2003) [pdf] as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI think you'd find it much harder to block RF signals than you would expect. As Matt Blaze found[1], creating even a small effective faraday cage can be quite difficult, and I imagine the problems only compound as you scale up. 1. https://www.mattblaze.org/blog/faraday/
Comment linking /blog/faraday/
on “Father who used a signal jammer to keep his kids offline at night faces jail”Submitted Testing Phone-Sized Faraday Bags as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
