Top all-time · #3180
Tom Ritter
Personal blog · ritter.vgsecurityprogramming
Tom Ritter's personal blog at ritter.vg covers security and programming. Since 2012, 23 different Hacker News readers have linked it 36 times, most often “De-Anonymizing alt.anonymous.messages”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-20, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (23) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Tom Ritter's blog for deep dives into anonymity and privacy, especially de-anonymizing alt.anonymous.messages and PGP usability. Other posts cover Firefox fingerprinting and first-party isolation.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 23 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Tom Ritter's personal homepage, where he rambles about tech-related topics.
Most-linked posts?
- De-Anonymizing alt.anonymous.messages4 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2013-08-10
- Webaudio Fingerprinting4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2026-08-20
- Telemetry helps. you still get to turn it off3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-03-05
- /blog-deanonymizing_amm.html2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-02-24
- Everything About Tor [pdf]2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-07-24
- De-Anonymizing alt.anonymous.messages [pdf]2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-02-25
- WebGL Renderer Privacy2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-06-01
What Hacker News says?
The HSTS commits /maybe/ suggest that Google thinks a Verisign intermediate was signing MITMs for Google properties. They just blacklisted "VeriSignClass3SSPIntermediateCA" See: https://chromiumcodereview.appspot.com/23523051 Note that the associated bug is private ( https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=173460 ). There's a good explanation of the "bad_static_spki_hashes" parameter here: http://ritter.…
Comment linking /blog-cas_and_pinning.html
on “New NSA Leak Shows MITM Attacks Against Major Internet Services”Submitted Everything About Tor [pdf] as a story · 96 points
HN discussionWouldn't those people have used encrypted communications over Usenet[1] or burner cell phones? Or sometimes even anonymous remailers? And all those are just as tricky. De-anonymizing alt.anonymous.messages ( http://ritter.vg/blog-deanonymizing_amm.html )
Comment linking /blog-deanonymizing_amm.html
on “Attacking Tor: How the NSA targets users' online anonymity”Submitted De-Anonymizing alt.anonymous.messages [pdf] as a story · 65 points
HN discussionYou've missed out "Use GPG, but perform one of many steps wrongly, and thus face torture or death". See also "deanonymizing alt.anonymous.messages" https://ritter.vg/blog-deanonymizing_amm.html
Comment linking /blog-deanonymizing_amm.html
on “GPG and Me”Submitted An Experimental “RequireCT” Directive for HSTS as a story · 12 points
HN discussionGo to https://ritter.vg/misc/ff/fpi.html On first load it should say "There was nothing in local storage." Now go to https://rittervg.com/misc/ff/fpi.html On first load it should say the same. If it says the same timestamp that was stored on the first page - it's not working. Source: I'm a Mozilla Developer who is one of the primary devs/supporters of First Party Isolation.
Comment linking /misc/ff/fpi.html
on “First-party isolation in Firefox: what breaks if you enable it?”Submitted De-Anonymizing alt.anonymous.messages as a story · 9 points
HN discussionUltimately we need something that is a cross between Skype's old decentralized architecture and alt.anonymous.messages. We can now stream videos of a few gigabytes with a large enough swarm. That should be enough to create large shared mailboxen among several hundred random people that lasts about a month at a time, at the end of which your mail program would automatically mail all the people in your address book at…
Comment linking /blog-deanonymizing_amm.html
on “Mailpile – taking e-mail back”Submitted Universal Email Encryption Specification as a story · 3 points
HN discussionGood to see I2P get some attention here. For those who don't know about I2P: * Anonymity network similar to TOR in some ways, but rather than focusing on getting someone out to the internet anonymously, I2P is a low-latency mix network with no out proxies. See: https://ritter.vg/blog-mix_and_onion_networks.html * Virtually every I2P router relays traffic, unlike TOR the network is very "flat". Directory servers are…
Comment linking /blog-mix_and_onion_networks.html
on “I2P: Invisible Internet Protocol”Submitted Telemetry helps. you still get to turn it off as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> There is, generally, no way to "brute force" an encrypted container containing child pornography for the simple reason that no one who respects the gravity of the situation would dare choose a password less than 8 characters. Even 8 a-z characters requires (26^8)/2 attempts to bruteforce on average, which is absurdly high. That's just not true. People viewing images of child sexual abuse used to buy access using t…
Comment linking /blog-deanonymizing_amm.html
on “A Warning: Do not turn in illegal files you found to the police.”Submitted My Tech Wishlist as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> Call me a sceptic, but this is probably why use of these protocols and principals is limited to security experts and software developers who understand these principals OpenPGP is impossible for most email users to get working correctly. Remember that most people don't even know the difference between CC and BCC. Here's an example of de-anonymising anonymous messages, supossedly from clueful users: https://ritter.…
Comment linking /blog-deanonymizing_amm.html
on “MEGAChat now includes end-to-end encryption”Submitted Webaudio Fingerprinting as a story · 1 points
HN discussionDARPA wants “a public wall anyone can monitor or post messages on, but only correct people can decrypt.” Great related talk "Defcon 21 - De-Anonymizing Alt.Anonymous. Messages" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Tj6c2Ikq_E https://ritter.vg/p/AAM-defcon13.pdf
Comment linking /p/AAM-defcon13.pdf
on “DARPA Is Looking For the Perfect Encryption App”Submitted WebGL Renderer Privacy as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> Sure, it's complicated if you don't understand the basics of public key encryption, but as soon as you do, GPG is trivial to use. Do you have any research to support your claims? Because everything I've seen says that PGP / GPG is hard to use, even for smart tech-literate people who have something to hide. These are all old. I don't know if it's got much better. http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/1998/abst…
Comment linking /blog-deanonymizing_amm.html
on “GPG and me (2015)”Submitted Telemetry helps. you still get to turn it off as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI think Colin's bang on here. Now is the time for cryptographers and software developers to act to implement a mature alternative to RSA, but it's not the point for your average joe to switch to an as yet relatively untested/unproven ECC implementation. For what it's worth, Tom Ritter recently posted his notes on de-anonymizing alt.anonymous.messages[1], something widely believed to be very anonymous and very secure…
Comment linking /blog-deanonymizing_amm.html
on “The Factoring Cryptopocalypse”Submitted Slide Deck: A Tor Overview by Tom Ritter [pdf] as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> Intentionally "anonymous" individuals don't use real email addresses. ( http://ritter.vg/blog-deanonymizing_amm.html ) Here's an analysis of de-anonymizing posts to alt.anonymous.messages - those people want to stay anonymous. They make some trivial mistakes. > Then I go into a large analysis of the types of PGP-encrypted messages there are. Messages encrypted to public keys, to passwords and passphrases, and PGP…
Comment linking /blog-deanonymizing_amm.html
on “De-anonymizing Users of French Political Forums [pdf]”Submitted On Couchsurfing's New Terms of service as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> Yet you provide no options for Tor, as in https://simplex.chat/docs/server.html your idea for anonymizing users is... For the user to hop through roughly 20 page document of dozens of commands to create the equivalent of personal VPN server, and amidst it, to connect anonymously to contacts' servers, you need to install... You need to understand things you criticise. There is no contradiction here. We don't think…
Comment linking /p/tor-v1.6.pdf
on “Essays: NSA Surveillance: A Guide to Staying Secure – Schneier on Security”People cannot use Gmail without help. People have trouble editing wikipedia. People misunderstand some simple concepts. Even people who have taken the time to install and use PGP, and who seem to want privacy, make weird mistakes such as "Messages encrypted to public keys, to passwords and passphrases, and PGP messages not encrypted at all!" http://ritter.vg/blog-deanonymizing_amm.html Usability of Security: A Case…
Comment linking /blog-deanonymizing_amm.html
on “Ask HN: Why is PGP not used widely?”One brittle, brute force method to do this (RSA-style) a decade ago was LD_PRELOAD vs. the RNG: Phidelius: Constructing Asymmetric Keypairs From Mere Passwords For Fun and PAKE https://dankaminsky.com/2012/01/03/phidelius/ Non-Persistent PGP Keys (2011) https://ritter.vg/blog-non_persistent_pgp.html -- Also related: https://github.com/jpf/lokey , "a tool for converting between cryptographic key formats". Unfortunate…
Comment linking /blog-non_persistent_pgp.html
on “Dangerous toys: Anything to ed25519 (SSH Keys)”There has been some research done on this particular anonymous newsgroup. “Deanonymising alt anonymous messages” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5JBMyxvuH8 The accompanying blog post is here: https://ritter.vg/blog-deanonymizing_amm.html The inherent security of the technique is actually quite strong. The tooling is terrible and many other problems exist with AAM, but in general the idea of having a shared “inbox”…
Comment linking /blog-deanonymizing_amm.html
on “Alt.Anonymous.Messages Newsgroup”For a time RFP - by itself - could be enabled by web extensions. (It might still be possible, I don't recall if we removed it.) But it's a footgun because it became even easier for people to enable it by accident. I can point you at a few things you could do if you wanted to pursue this: 1) We have a dev extension https://github.com/mozilla-extensions/fingerprinting-protect... that lets you enable/disable individual…
Comment linking /blog-telemetry.html
on “Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL”And to the point about Mozilla's protections lacking, I've corrected the record: https://ritter.vg/blog-webgl_renderer.html
Comment linking /blog-webgl_renderer.html
on “Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL”
