I made it out of Vegas! That was a rather intense 8 days and if I'm honest, returning to the relative tranquillity of Oslo has been lovely (not to mention the massive uptick in coffee quality). But just as the US to Europe jet lag passes, it's time to head back to Aus for a bit and go through the whole cycle again. And just on that, I've found that diet makes a hell of a difference in coping with this sort of thing: The number one most effective way I’ve found for coping with jet lag, stress, crazy work loads and general health is to focus on diet. It’s hard to control a lot of other environmental...

Almost one year ago now, I declared extended validation certificates dead. The entity name had just been removed from Safari on iOS, it was about to be removed from Safari on Mojave and there were indications that Chrome would remove it from the desktop in the future (they already weren't displaying it on mobile clients). The only proponents of EV seemed to be those selling it or those who didn't understand how reliance on the absence of a positive visual indicator was simply never a good idea in the first place. The writing might have been on the wall a year ago, but the death warrant is now well and truly inked with both Chrome and Firefox killing it stone...

Well that's Vegas done. 8 days of absolutely non-stop events that's now pretty much robbed me of my voice but hey, I got a flying cow! Scott and I both spent BSides, Black Hat and DEF CON doing "hallway con" or in other words, wandering around just meeting people. The personal engagement you get from these ad hoc meetups really can't be beat and I appreciate everyone who took the time to come over and say hi. Just a sample of our week is below: Approaching a week of @BSidesLV, @BlackHatEvents and @defcon. Three conferences, tens of thousands of people and 44C temps. This’ll be interesting... pic.twitter.com/049DzhpePF — Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) August 5, 2019 The best...

Vegas! I'm a bit late with this week's update but I thought I'd catch up with Scott Helme and do the video together. We're talking about the events in Vegas, the ongoing Project Svalbard process, some very screwy messaging about certificates from Sectigo and the Irish government coming on board HIBP. Next week we'll do another one from Vegas and talk about what the events of the week here were like. ReferencesSectigo made some pretty wild claims about EV certs (read the tweet thread by Scott)The subsequent rebuttals by David from Sectigo are worth reading (although they still don't justify the earlier claims IMHO)The Irish government is now using HIBP to monitor all their domains (they now join...

Over the last year and a bit I've been working to make more data in HIBP freely available to governments around the world that want to monitor their own exposure in data breaches. Like the rest of us, governments regularly rely on services that fall victim to attacks resulting in data being disclosed and just like the commercial organisations monitoring domains on HIBP, understanding that exposure is important. To date, the UK, Australian, Spanish and Austrian governments have come onboard HIBP for nation-wide government domain monitoring and today, I'm happy to welcome the Irish government as well. They now have access to all .gov.ie domains and a handful of other government ones on different TLDs. A big welcome to...

What. A. Week. I've been in San Fran meeting with a whole bunch of potential purchasers for HIBP and it's been... intense. Daunting. Exciting. It's actually an amazing feeling to see my "little" project come to this where I'm sitting in a room with some of the most awesome tech companies whilst flanked by bankers in suits. I try and give a bit of insight into that in this week's video, keeping in mind of course that I'm a bit limited by how much detail I can go into right now. As the process unfolds I'll share more, but hopefully this will give you a little taste of what I'm going through at present. References Our password hashing has no...

It's the last one from Norway before heading off to the US and diving into the deep end of the Project Svalbard pool followed by Black Hat and DEF CON in Vegas. That's off the back of the last week being focused on pushing out Pwned Passwords V5, loading several hundred million new records worth of new data breaches and finally launching something I've been very excited about for a long time now: auth on the HIBP API. I spend most of this week's update talking about that because it's such an important feature and I especially wanted to make it clear why there's now literally a financial price to pay for entry. All that and more in this week's...

The very first feature I added to Have I Been Pwned after I launched it back in December 2013 was the public API. My thinking at the time was that it would make the data more easily accessible to more people to go and do awesome things; build mobile clients, integrate into security tools and surface more information to more people to enable them to do positive and constructive things with the data. I highlighted 3 really important attributes at the time of launch: There is no authentication. There is no rate limiting. There is no cost. One of those changed nearly 3 years ago now - I had to add a rate limit. The other 2 are changing today...

So "Plan A" was to publish Pwned Passwords V5 on Tuesday but a last-minute check showed control characters had snuck in due to the quality (or lack thereof) of the source data. Scratch that and go to "Plan B" which was to push them out today but a last-minute check showed that my "improved" export script had screwed up the encoding and every single hash was wrong. "Plan C" is now to push them out on the weekend with everything working correctly. Hopefully. If I don't screw anything up again... The constant challenge I've faced over the last few years is the massive amount of multi-tasking required to do all the things I'm presently doing. I touched on this in...

Almost 2 years ago to the day, I wrote about Passwords Evolved: Authentication Guidance for the Modern Era. This wasn't so much an original work on my behalf as it was a consolidation of advice from the likes of NIST, the NCSC and Microsoft about how we should be doing authentication today. I love that piece because so much of it flies in the face of traditional thinking about passwords, for example: Don't impose composition rules (upper case, lower case, numbers, etc)Don't mandate password rotation (enforced changing of it every few months)Never implement password hintsAnd of most relevance to the discussion here today, don't allow people to use passwords that have already been exposed in a data breach....