Azure

For the most part, Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) runs very smoothly, especially given how cheaply I run many parts of the service for. Occasionally though, I screw up and get something wrong that interrupts the otherwise slick operation and results in some outage. Last weekend was one such occasion and I want to explain what I got wrong, how you might get it wrong too and then, of course, how to fix it. But first, some background: A few months ago I announced that Mozilla and AgileBits were baking HIBP into Firefox and 1Password (I'll call them "subscribers" in this post). They're leveraging the anonymity model described there to ensure their users can search for their identities without me...

As time has gone by, one of the things I've enjoyed the most in running Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) is seeing how far I could make the dollars stretch. How big can it go whilst at the same time, running it on a shoestring? I keep finding new ways of optimising cost and the two most significant contributions to that since launching almost 5 years ago have come via serverless technology provided by 2 of my favourite tech companies: Cloudflare and Microsoft. By way of (very brief) background, one of the features in HIBP is Pwned Passwords. This is a repository of 517M passwords from previous data breaches that organisations can refer to in order to stop people from...

Two of my favourite developer things these days are Azure Functions and Cloudflare Workers. They're both "serverless" in that rather than running on your own slice of infrastructure, that concept is abstracted away and you get to focus on just code executions rather than the logical bounds of the server it runs on. So for example, when you have an Azure function and you deploy it under a consumption plan, you pay for per-second resource consumption (how much memory you use for how long) and the number of times it executes. If you have an efficient function that executes quickly it can be extremely cost effective as I recently demonstrated with the Pwned Passwords figures: So here'...

In the immortal words of Ricky Bobby, I wanna go fast. When I launched Pwned Passwords V2 last week, I made it fast - real fast - and I want to talk briefly here about why that was important, how I did it and then how I've since shaved another 56% off the load time for requests that hit the origin. And a bunch of other cool perf stuff while I'm here. Why Speed Matters for Pwned Passwords Firstly, read the previous post about k-Anonymity and protecting the privacy of passwords to save me repeating it all here. I've been amazed at how quickly this has been adopted since I pushed it out very early on Thursday morning my time....

A few years back, I added a donations page to Have I been pwned (HIBP). Now as I explained at the time, I didn't particularly need them to cover my hard-cash outgoings because I run the thing on a shoestring, but as I explain on that page, it takes a massive amount of effort. If people want to fling me a coffee or some beers, that's just great and I appreciate it enormously. Problem is, it's hard to individually show that appreciation. Especially during a busy period, I can end up with a lot of coffee and I can't realistically reply to each and every person by email thanking them or I end up with exactly the problem I describe...

I've been really actively involved with building things on Microsoft's Azure cloud for probably about 4 or 5 years now. Many of you will know already that Have I been pwned (HIBP) was built from the ground up on Azure (in fact, one of the reasons I built the service was to play with Azure "in anger"!), what less people know is the work I'd been doing before that. In my previous life looking after Pfizer's software architecture in this corner of the world, I was pushing hard to move apps we were building into Azure, in particular the PaaS constructs they have available. Time and time again, the discussion would go like this: Vendor: (Pfizer outsourced all...

I wrote recently about how Have I been pwned (HIBP) had an API rate limit introduced and then brought forward which was in part a response to large volumes of requests against the API. It was causing sudden ramp ups of traffic that Azure couldn't scale fast enough to meet and was also hitting my hip pocket as I paid for the underlying infrastructure to scale out in response. By limiting requests to one per every 1.5 seconds and then returning HTTP 429 in excess of that, the rate limit meant there was no longer any point in hammering away at the service. However, just because there's no point in it doesn't mean that people aren't going to do...

Let us start with what's wrong with the world today, and that's certificate authorities. Just take a look at the trusted root CAs running on a Windows 10 machine: The very premise of having these root CAs on your machine is that they ultimate get to decide which websites your browser will consider to have a valid SSL certificate. The root CAs serve other purposes too, but that's what I'm especially interested in here. Edit: As Tom points out below, there are hundreds of other root certs the OS will happily trust as required. Microsoft documents this on the Microsoft Trusted Root Certificate Program page. Now here's the point I'm driving at - if QuoVadis wants to sign a certificate...

Hey, did you hear about this new security risk? It’s called SQL injection and attackers can just suck all your datas out of your system if you screw it up badly enough. Allegedly there’s like, millions of websites at risk and even kids can easily break into them! Wait – this isn’t a new risk?! Well how come it’s all over the news and these seriously large companies keep getting pwned by it?! How is that even possible?! And here we are at that reality of today; SQL injection, whilst well understood for a good decade and a half, remains the number one risk on the web today. Certainly it’s...

I’ve always written very publicly about how Have I been pwned (HIBP) was conceived, built and indeed how it performs. If ever there was a time to look back at that performance, it’s in the wake of the first few days after loading in the Ashley Madison breach. I want to share the “warts and all account” of what I observed over the three days of utter chaos that ensued. I first learned of the incident at about 6am local on Wednesday which was very shortly after the torrent first hit the air (remember, I’m in Australia which is in the future for most of you). During the day, I pulled down...