Recreating Craig Wright’s Sartre File

By the time I had a look into Craig Wright’s blog post that seemed to imply that he is Satoshi, others had already pointed out that the signature was copied from a 2009 transaction. The contents of the “Sartre” file, however, were still a mystery. Dan Kaminsky had a blog post up analyzing the commands from CW’s post, but hadn’t been able to figure that bit out, so he asked me to have a look.

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HTTPS Subresource Validation Fail

In the spring of 2014, I found a bug in several browsers, including Epiphany, Xombrero, Opera Mini and Midori. They were loading subresources, such as scripts, from HTTPS servers without doing proper certificate validation. I tracked this down to some bad defaults in webkit which have since been fixed.

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Why I’m Releasing a Brainwallet Cracker at DEFCON 23

On August 7th I will be giving a talk at DEF CON about cracking brainwallets. As part of that talk, I will be releasing a fast brainwallet cracker. I’m writing this post to provide a little insight as to why I’m giving away a tool that could be used to steal. I also hope that people who are currently using brainwallets will take notice and move to a more secure storage method.

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Using GitHub With Multiple Accounts or Deploy Keys

GitHub’s implementation of git over ssh identifies accounts (for purposes of access control) solely by ssh public key. As a consequence, a particular public key can be associated with, at most, one account. Deploy keys are even more restricted - they can only be associated with a single repository. While ssh can try several keys, GitHub doesn’t know what you’re trying to access until after you authenticate, so a workaround is required to select the right key.

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Stupid Certificate Tricks

Sometimes I do things for no real reasons other than “because I can” and/or “it amuses me”. For example, embedding a snarky message into my HTTPS certificate.

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Why Bitcoin Mining ASICs Won’t Crack Your Password

I’ve seen a lot of people expressing concern that Bitcoin mining ASICs are going to lead to some sort of password cracking apocalypse.

They won’t.

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How I Made My Header Image

I’m pretty happy with how my header image (seen above) turned out. Here’s how it was made:

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Never Forget to Start Screen Again

There a few systems that I frequently work on from multiple locations. I like to be able to log back in and pick up where I left off after disconnecting and screen is great for that, but I have to remember to start it before I do anything else. After forgetting one too many times, I figured out how to start it automatically when I open an interactive SSH session. Here’s what I came up with:

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