A preliminary analysis of “Bom Sabado” orkut worm

So, today morning I received an email saying I received an Orkut scrap from a friend with contents “Bom Sabado”. Within a minute, I received the same scrap from another friend. Now getting the feeling that this must be some sort of worm, I decided to open Orkut with firebug logging enabled to see what was going on. It turns out that it’s a typical case of Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), the attacker can inject and execute its script from hxxp://tptools.org/worm.js and the contents of scrap are able to by-pass Orkut sanitization.

Is HTTPS secure?

We all use HTTPS and vaguely understands it as a more secure form of communication. This article is aimed at better understanding of HTTPS and how secure it is.

BlackBerry Controversy in India

Indian Govt. has asked RIM (maker of the BlackBerry smartphone) to provide access to the data going through its servers for intelligence purposes and it appears that BlackBerry has accepted the demands. Due to the lack of understanding of encryption on the part of Indian media, misleading and ambiguous reports have been published on the same. This blog post is an effort to clarify the same.

Understanding Directory Permissions on Linux

This blog post is for those who understand how file permissions work but are looking for an explanation on how file permissions behave when they are applied to directories.

Animation in diagrams (presentations in Latex)

While most people draw diagrams in Xfig (or GIMP) and include them in LaTeX, they can be drawn directly in LaTeX (using tikz package). A major advantage of doing that is animation (\pause) is possible when using these diagrams in presentations(based on beamer) Following is an example demonstrating that (code released under BSD license)

Basic GDB Tutorial

So, you believe there are bugs in your C/C++ code or you have encountered SEGFAULT while executing your code. What will you do? write a lot of printf statements at various places in your code under suspicion OR use gdb (GNU code debugger) This article is about Approach 2

Programming in Linux for newbies

This is meant to be a small guide (though not exhaustive) for students beginning to program on Linux system. Particularly for those, who have done extensive C/C++ programming in Windows, using the Borland/Turbo interface or the Visual C++ interface, and are greatly intimidated by the Linux platform.

GCC Hacks

A small list of GCC Hacks g++ -o helloworld helloworld.cc produces helloworld binary from helloworld.cc C++ file. use -Wall switch turns on all warnings(potential errors) in the code (like unused variables) g++ -E helloworld.cc generates output code after the pre-processing stage.