Top all-time · #3677
Michael Orlitzky
Personal blog · michael.orlitzky.com/articlessecurityprogramming
Michael Orlitzky's personal blog at michael.orlitzky.com covers security and programming. Since 2017, 21 different Hacker News readers have linked it 26 times, most often “Motherfuckers need package management (2015)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (10) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog's articles on Unix file security, including symlinks, hardlinks, chown races and privilege escalation, plus essays on package management. Commenters cite them as background for these topics.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 10 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Motherfuckers need package management (2015)5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2017-05-14
- Posix hardlink heartache3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-07-06
- In defense of self-signed certificates (2013)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-05-12
- Let's Not Encrypt [2019]2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-11-30
- Greybeard's tomb: the lost treasure of language design (2019)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-02-01
- Let's Not Encrypt (2019)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-11-20
What Hacker News says?
Portage solves a few of these. http://michael.orlitzky.com/articles/motherfuckers_need_pack...
Comment linking /articles/motherfuckers_need_package_management.xhtml
on “Python Is Eating the World”Submitted Let's Not Encrypt (2019) as a story · 111 points
HN discussionNo, there is absolutely nothing broken about symbolic links. What is the issue here is accessing user files as root. That is inherently unsafe in POSIX and also affects hardlinks as well (even more so, since you have to "follow" hardlinks http://michael.orlitzky.com/articles/posix_hardlink_heartach... ).
Comment linking /articles/posix_hardlink_heartache.xhtml
on “The trouble with symbolic links”Submitted Posix hardlink heartache as a story · 103 points
HN discussionNotable prior submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37262457 Also by the author: https://michael.orlitzky.com/articles/in_defense_of_self-sig...
Comment linking /articles/in_defense_of_self-signed_certificates.xhtml
on “Let's Not Encrypt (2019)”Submitted CSC ServiceWorks laundry machine coin bypass (2023) as a story · 71 points
HN discussionThe author links to one example at the top of the article ("CVE-2017-18188: opentmpfiles root privilege escalation via recursive chown"): http://michael.orlitzky.com/cves/cve-2017-18188.xhtml Apparently a user can create a hardlink to a sensitive root-owned file (like /etc/shadow) in a user-writable directory where they know a privileged process (in this case tmpfiles.d) will come along and chown it to the user, aft…
Comment linking /cves/cve-2017-18188.xhtml
on “Posix hardlink heartache”Submitted Greybeard's tomb: the lost treasure of language design (2019) as a story · 26 points
HN discussionyes certainly, this page would be good to link to: http://michael.orlitzky.com/articles/lets_not_encrypt.xhtml (not my writing, but i appreciated the sentiment of it)
Comment linking /articles/lets_not_encrypt.xhtml
on “A Collection of 88x31 pixel web buttons from the 1990s and 2000s”Submitted Greybeard's tomb: the lost treasure of language design (2019) as a story · 23 points
HN discussionhttp://michael.orlitzky.com/articles/motherfuckers_need_pack...
Comment linking /articles/motherfuckers_need_package_management.xhtml
on “So you want to write a package manager (2016)”Submitted In defense of self-signed certificates (2013) as a story · 9 points
HN discussionThese links (pun unfortunate) should help: https://sysctl-explorer.net/fs/protected_hardlinks/ http://michael.orlitzky.com/articles/posix_hardlink_heartach...
Comment linking /articles/posix_hardlink_heartache.xhtml
on “The Quest to Secure chown and symlinks”Submitted Let's Not Encrypt [2019] as a story · 5 points
HN discussionResearching this, found [1]: > POSIX guarantees that hard links can exist. It follows that, on POSIX systems without any non-standard protections, it's unsafe for anyone (but in particular, root) to do anything sensitive in a directory that is writable by another user. Cross-platform programs designed to do so are simply flawed. I feel like something had to have been lost in translation from Unix to POSIX here. In t…
Comment linking /articles/posix_hardlink_heartache.xhtml
on “The Quest to Secure chown and symlinks”Submitted Motherfuckers need package management (2015) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionvery related: https://michael.orlitzky.com/articles/motherfuckers_need_pac...
Comment linking /articles/motherfuckers_need_package_management.xhtml
on “The C-Shaped Hole in Package Management”Submitted Let's not Encrypt as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> The pattern is always the same. You do one syscall to check something about a path, then another syscall to act on the same path. Between those two calls, an attacker with write access to a parent directory can swap the path component for a symbolic link. The kernel re-resolves the path from scratch on the second call, and the privileged action lands on the attacker’s chosen target. It's actually even worse than t…
Comment linking /articles/posix_hardlink_heartache.xhtml
on “Bugs Rust Won't Catch”Submitted Greybeard's tomb: the lost treasure of language design as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Motherfuckers need package management (2015) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted CSC ServiceWorks laundry machine coin bypass as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Motherfuckers_need_package_management (2015) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted In defense of self-signed certificates as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Motherfuckers need package management (2015) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Greybeard's tomb: the lost treasure of language design (2019) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
