intunderflow

Hi folks,

This is a quick project I've been working on for a night or two, it lets you talk to people in your native language and then read replies from them in your language too.

It's a pretty simple webapp, the messages flow over Ably (https://ably.com) and then get translated by GCP's Cloud Translation API.

When I went to the UN I found it magical how I could talk to people in any language through the interpretation system, seamlessly avoiding any language barrier, I hoped to replicate at least some of that magic in this :)

Didn't Azure have another massive security vulnerability just a few months ago?

Find an answer to that question to collect a tidy profit ;)

Great chance for some Arbitrage there (buy rubles with USD, use to buy BTC there, cash straight back out to USD)

I would do it but I expect I'd be beaten to it with how long it would take to open an account at Binance

If you want to fund guns for Ukraine to fight back, you can donate directly to the Ministry of Defense here: https://ukraine.ua/news/support-the-armed-forces-of-ukraine/

They literally do this on Roblox, I've seen over 20(!) hard puzzles and about 10 seconds to solve each one: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/impossible-roblox-captcha/3214...

For some challenges, this is so impossible that people give up with logging in until it calms down in a few hours, even Roblox employees and full time developers

People have told me that Arkose pay people to run their captchas and present lots of fancy metrics of attacks they've stopped which is why some websites seem to be ok with destroying user experience by running this

Another reminder to not work for Amazon

Remember to donate to sci-hub to keep it going! Even a small donation helps and is way more than the extortionate prices we'd all have to pay without it :D

Basically implications in terms of labour laws / tax, I'm pretty sure we're slowly opening up (I think Germany is next up)

Monzo | Backend Engineer (Security Infrastructure) | £75k - £100k + stock | Remote (UK, IE, FR) or in London, whatever works for you | Full-time | https://monzo.com

What's Monzo?

At Monzo, we’re building a new kind of bank. One that lives on your smartphone and built for the way you live today.

We believe there should be an alternative to the banking of the past: we're focused on solving problems, rather than selling financial products, making your financial life simpler, and giving you complete control from your smartphone.

Internally, we encourage an open, collaborative, inclusive working environment. We contribute to open source software, and we continually engage with our wonderful community.

The role (it's on my team :D)

We’re looking for a Backend Engineer (Security Infrastructure) to ensure that Monzo’s platform and core infrastructure is safe and secure by design.

You’ll help us with the following questions and challenges:

Securing our critical infrastructure, such as Kubernetes, Cassandra, Kafka, and the AWS services, Data Centres and networks they rely on; Providing and managing the foundational infrastructure for other Security and Platform Engineering squads to build upon; Managing our secrets, keys and certificates to ensure our systems are airtight; Automating access control and permissioning for our cloud infrastructure. Here are some of the projects the team have worked on in the past:

https://monzo.com/blog/controlling-outbound-traffic-from-kub...

https://monzo.com/blog/2019/10/11/how-our-security-team-hand...

https://monzo.com/blog/we-built-network-isolation-for-1-500-...

Apply here: https://boards.greenhouse.io/monzo/jobs/2409362

It's always the Munich court making these stupid rulings. How long until they fine an ISP for forwarding my packets over a Google AS on the way to its destination.

It's absolutely mad that the temporary restraining order was even approved from the outset. No court should be able to compel people to keep working at a private employer on pain of contempt of court, in some perverted form of indentured servitude.

Someone has sniped http://noplacetohide.uk and put a post in support of E2E encryption on it

I'm currently in the UK, and at least here I've been told by legal that a negative reference can lead to massive issues in front of an Employment Tribunal, and that it's effectively not worth it when we can just decline to give any reference at all.

On the flip side, a reference has an implicit duty of skill and care to both the former employee and the person asking for the reference, so an overly-positive reference can also lead to legal liability from the person asking for the reference.

In some regulated industries the content and form of references is also regulated as well, for example see pages 11 and 31 of https://www.handbook.fca.org.uk/handbook/SYSC/22.pdf

(None of this is legal advice)

Not sure if its the same in the USA, but in Europe there are massive legal liability issues to giving a negative reference - most places give no reference or a standard set of terms because of this

I previously used TeamViewer but had issues with them false-flagging me as a commercial user and kicking me off constantly.

I've now got a shared google account on my Chromebook and their computer, Chrome Remote Desktop is installed on their PC and I have the PIN, with that I can just go to remotedesktop.google.com (on the shared account) and join their computer whenever they ask for help.

I was originally planning to use the system where they generate a code first, but they're nowhere near the technical level for that to not become a nightmare quickly, so now it's just flat remote desktop.

The amount of impact this has is absolutely mind-boggling: https://github.com/YfryTchsGD/Log4jAttackSurface/tree/master...

Because the US government is one of the few groups that can put real pressure on them and they're in full panic mode

Combined with the outage yesterday this hasn't been a good weekend for GitHub SRE's

I'm surprised something like this happened on a weekend though since I wouldn't expect anyone to be changing anything in the codebase (then again it could be some infra has just ran out of storage or etc)

These are covered by the exceptions procedure as described in the script, just to clarify the Ceremony Administrator is a per-ceremony role rather than a permanent occupation so dismissal would just involve replacement with another team member.

Exceptions are evaluated, documented and acted upon from the moment they are discovered. The Ceremony Administrator decides what to do about them after consulting the Internal Witness (but the CA gets to decide), at the end of every ceremony (with exceptions or not) we ask every participant to sign a sheet saying they're happy we effectively haven't breached security (last page of here: https://monzo.com/static/docs/redacted-root-certificate-auth... ), if they don't sign, that would kick off a large discussion about whether we're happy to continue using these roots or replace them.

From memory we've had about 2 exceptions which have been resolved, both very minor (as ever, when you get into the room stuff comes up that you couldn't have planned for, if I recall one was something silly like a typo in the command documented on the script, so we just ran the command without the typo, etc).

I've heard about the rotting, we've got a plan in about a year or two to do a key ceremony to move stuff onto more permanent hardware we can retain for at least 20 years (our roots last 15)

What that hardware will be is still an open question, but probably BD-R HTL.

Also worth noting (I think it's in the script too from memory) we make at least 3 identical copies of each CD in case of CD failure.

We have multiple identical backup HSMs in multiple different sites. Any one of these + a keyholder quorum can recover the system. The entire safe room burning down is part of our possible disasters list.

I hope this post doesn't come across as a brag as it's not meant to be, being arrogant about security only ends one way after all...

I published this because I want to be open about how we do these things, because I think we safely can be and it shows that we care and don't just pay lip-service to security

If you'd like to show us up for our security though, please do peek at our HackerOne program. I'm a program admin on it and I'd love to read more interesting reports https://hackerone.com/monzo <3 (I know it doesn't have a paid bounty yet, I'm advocating for it)

or is it twelve??? I edited this document before publishing it after all :P

for all you know, I rolled two dice to decide how many keyholders I'd put in each part (which I would totally never do, would I?)

I think either the blog post is worded wrong (sorry) or you've misread if you think that, I talked a bit about the laptop precautions here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29266521

And why it's just a laptop here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29267685

To be super clear, the actual private keys only ever exist on HSMs

Do you mean testing if someone can break in or testing that our system can handle disaster recovery?

This isn't an invitation to attack us beyond as part of our HackerOne program (please don't make my life more difficult) but to steal a line from someone else at Monzo: Kerckhoffs's principle probably has some cross-over relevancy to this stuff.

Can't really comment on why other banks don't talk about this so you'll have to draw your own conclusions on that :P

If you're interested in how other folks handle super important private keys, I highly suggest reading the IANA documentation on the DNSSEC Root Zone and how they manage that:

https://www.iana.org/dnssec/archive

https://www.iana.org/dnssec/ceremonies

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChND9hEeJQjtLDFZ-m8U47A

Coen boots off a CD and mounts itself into RAM as and when parts of it are loaded, but you still need the CD in the computer for it to load stuff not in RAM so we have a 2nd CD reader + writer for the material

You can tell if you're using a part of the OS that hasn't been used in a session yet because you can hear the CD drive with the OS CD in it physically spin up :)

The keys are on a HSM, but something has to nicely ask the HSM to do things and an air-gapped laptop feels like a pretty sensible choice? (Especially given the precautions we've talked about)