The article discusses a bizarre cryptographic bug that was discovered and fixed in the Telegram messaging app's protocol (called MTProto) around 7 years ago. The bug allowed Telegram's servers to perform an undetectable man-in-the-middle attack and decrypt all messages in supposedly end-to-end encrypted "secret chats".
The issue stemmed from Telegram using standard finite-field Diffie-Hellman key exchange to establish a shared secret between chat participants, but then pointlessly XORing the result with a server-provided nonce value. This allowed the server to manipulate the nonce so that both parties ended up with the same key, which the server also knew, breaking the encryption.

Removing the nonce step fixed the vulnerability, showing it served no legitimate purpose. The author finds this the most backdoor-looking bug they've seen, as the protocol designers seemingly went out of their way to add complexity that only enabled interception. An official Telegram statement apparently claimed the nonce was to protect clients with weak randomness, but the author dismisses this explanation as nonsensical.
While this is an old issue and there may be better reasons not to use Telegram today, the author still considers it a prime example of how blatant and bizarre cryptographic backdoors can look in practice. The unnecessary complexity is a big red flag.

An informal comparison of the three major implementations of std:string
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16 years of CVE-2008-0166 – Debian OpenSSL Bug
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https://go.dev/blog/chacha8rand

Explore the recent advancements in randomness within the Go programming language. Authors Russ Cox and Filippo Valsorda, part of the Go team, look closely at the complexities of addressing security requirements for specific use cases and the implementation of the ChaCha(Rand8) algorithm. Discover how these improvements have enhanced random number generation in Go, culminating in the seamless security enhancements introduced in Go 1.22.

Kernel.org servers infected with backdoors for two years from 2009
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Visualizing algorithms for rate limiting
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یکی از رایج ترین حمله های امنیتی
توی همه جا به کار میره، توی این ویکی پدیا یه مثال از authorization زده بود

ولی مثلا شما یه بازی رو در نظر بگیرین
داخل بازی، شما روی یه دکمه ای کلیک میکنین و یه پکت (packet) به سرور فرستاده میشه.
حالا من میخوام توی این بازی تقلب کنم و این کار رو خودکار سازی کنم (مثلا یه کد بنویسم که هر ۱۰ دقیقه یبار، اینو بفرسته به بک اند و ۲۴ ساعته هم رانش میکنم)
چیکار میکنم؟ میام میبینم بازی چه دیتایی رو داره به بک اند میفرسته، اینو ذخیره میکنم و بعدا دوباره میفرستمش =)

برای همین بک اند همیشه باید یه مکانیزمی برای جلوگیری از این حمله داشته باشه

Ubuntu 24.10 to Default to Wayland for Nvidia Users
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Hackers once stole a casino's high-roller database through a thermometer in the lobby fish tank (2018)

#IoT (internet of things)

To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language (2020)
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You have no idea how much I hate you.

effective presentations