Robert Graham

Errata Security

Today a couple vulnerabilities were announced in Zoom, the popular work-from-home conferencing app. Hackers can possibly exploit these to do evil things to you, such as steal your password. Because of the COVID-19, these vulns have hit the mainstream media. This means my non-techy friends and relatives have been asking ... Read More

Today Huawei published a video explaining the concept of "backdoors" in telco equipment. Many are criticizing the video for being tone deaf. I don't understand this concept of "tone deafness". Instead, I want to explore the facts.Does the word “#backdoor” seem frightening? That’s because it’s often used incorrectly – sometimes ... Read More

In software development, we start with a "requirements specification" defining what the software is supposed to do. Voting machine security is often in the news, with suspicion the Russians are trying to subvert our elections. Would blockchain or mobile phone voting work? I don't know. These things have tradeoffs that ... Read More

There's no evidence the Saudis hacked Jeff Bezos's iPhone.This is the conclusion of the all the independent experts who have reviewed the public report behind the U.N.'s accusations. That report failed to find evidence proving the theory, but instead simply found unknown things it couldn't explain, which it pretended was ... Read More

At the center of the "Saudis hacked Bezos" story is a mysterious video file investigators couldn't decrypt, sent by Saudi Crown Prince MBS to Bezos via WhatsApp. In this blog post, I show how to decrypt it. Once decrypted, we'll either have a smoking gun proving the Saudi's guilt, or ... Read More

I'm currently experiencing the toxic hell that is a misunderstood tweet going viral. It's a property of the social media. The more they can deliberately misunderstand you, the more they can justify the toxicity of their response. Unfortunately, I had to delete it in order to stop all the toxic ... Read More

"RISC" was an important architecture from the 1980s when CPUs had fewer than 100,000 transistors. By simplifying the instruction set, they free up transistors for more registers and better pipelining. It meant executing more instructions, but more than making up for this by executing them faster.But once CPUs exceed a ... Read More

Trump's conversation with the President of Ukraine mentions "CrowdStrike". I thought I'd explain this.What was said?This is the text from the conversation covered in this“I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike... I guess you have one of your wealthy ... Read More

I had a Twitter thread on the OSI model. Below it's compiled into one blogpostYea, I've got 3 hours to kill here in this airport lounge waiting for the next leg of my flight, so let's discuss the "OSI Model". There's no such thing. What they taught you is a ... Read More

This blogpost contains a long Twitter thread on input parsers. I thought I'd copy the thread here as a blogpost.I am spending far too long on this chapter on "parsers". It's this huge gaping hole in Computer Science where academics don't realize it's a thing. It's like physics missing one ... Read More