network security

Apple security head Ivan Krstic gives a Black Hat 2016 talk on iOS security, covering HomeKit, Auto Unlock and iCloud Keychain. He explains key hierarchies and how data can stay safe even in adversarial clouds.

Meredith Patterson and Sergey Bratus argue that networked software stays insecure because protocols and inputs are too complex to recognize safely. They propose using formal language theory and grammars to build secure, verifiable input handling.

Van Jacobson's 2006 Google Tech Talk argues that networking should be rethought around named data rather than host-to-host conversations. He contrasts the circuit and datagram views of the internet and sketches content-centric networking as a replacement for the location-centric TCP/IP model.

The first of a short series by Welch Labs on building a complete neural network in Python. It introduces the data and the architecture of a simple network before later parts cover forward propagation, gradient descent, and backpropagation.

Van Jacobson's 2006 Google Tech Talk argues for rethinking networking around named data rather than host-to-host connections. He gives the history and the unsolved problems of the current internet architecture.

Lock-picking YouTuber Bill Johnson (BosnianBill) explains how to choose a high-security lock and why, showing examples and comparing designs. It covers what makes some padlocks more pick-resistant than others.

A Wendover Productions explainer on how airport security is designed, covering screening layers, x-ray scanning, and the contrast with Israel's profiling-based approach. It walks through the logic behind why security works the way it does.

A dialogue with Gary Weber on the default mode network, meditation and non-dual awakening, with discussion of psychedelics, thought and time. It is part of the Non-Dual Couch series.

A two-hour NANOG tutorial by Richard Steenbergen aimed at network engineers, covering optical networking technologies. This is the updated 2017 edition of a recurring talk.

Ivan Krstic's Black Hat talk on Apple platform security, including the Find My design that uses elliptic curve key diversification to locate offline devices privately. It also covers hardware features such as the T2 chip and secure boot hardening.

Craig Heffner's Black Hat 2013 talk on exploiting network surveillance cameras, covering how insecure their firmware is. It shows how easily such devices can be compromised.

A 2017 video arguing that banks and Blockstream steered Bitcoin toward the Lightning Network. It is partisan commentary from the Bitcoin Cash side of the scaling dispute.

Cloth Map documents Havana's SNET, a community-built private network that Cubans created because internet prices were high. It is used for gaming and sharing.

Andrej Karpathy's first Neural Networks: Zero to Hero lecture, which builds micrograd, a tiny autograd engine, from scratch in Python. It explains backpropagation and neural network training step by step, assuming only basic Python and some high-school calculus.

James Mickens's humorous USENIX Security keynote argues that improving security and trusting opaque technology like machine learning is far harder than the industry admits.

Andrew "bunnie" Huang examines how realistic hardware supply chain attacks are, from rogue insiders to nation states, in the wake of the Bloomberg Businessweek report. He explains how undocumented components could be hidden on boards and how hard they are to spot.

Van Jacobson's 2006 Google Tech Talk on rethinking networking around named content instead of host-to-host conversations. He recounts packet-networking history and lays out the content-centric networking idea that later became NDN.

An 8-minute explainer on the Lightning Network and how it relates to Segwit, Bitcoin and Litecoin. It covers how off-chain payment channels route payments to scale blockchain transactions.

Lieutenant General Mark Hertling gives a TEDx talk arguing that obesity and poor youth fitness are a national security problem because too few young Americans can meet military physical requirements.

A seven-minute Google I/O 2014 talk by Simon Newton on how developers can make use of Google's global network. It describes the network's footprint and some of the services running on it.

A 34C3 talk on the security architecture of the Nintendo Switch and the early progress breaking it. It introduces the Switch's custom OS and software stack, with the hackers' reverse-engineering and glitching work.

Tony Chen of Microsoft explains at BlueHat Seattle 2019 how the Xbox One was designed to resist physical attacks. He covers the security design and hypervisor-based OS architecture that kept the console uncracked for years.

Google's Amin Vahdat gives the ONS 2015 keynote on Google's datacenter networking, including its custom hardware, software-defined networking and very high bisection bandwidth.

3Blue1Brown's first chapter on deep learning explains what neurons and layers are and the math underlying a basic neural network, using handwritten digit recognition with visual animations.

Dan Geer's Black Hat 2014 keynote argues that cybersecurity is a matter of power and policy rather than wishful thinking. He covers surveillance, the vulnerability market, software liability and privacy as the capacity to misrepresent yourself.

Bungie's David Aldridge explains the networking programming behind Halo: Reach in a 2011 GDC session. It covers how gameplay stays in sync online, including forecasting and state reconciliation.

Sentdex demonstrates GAN Theft Auto, a GameGAN-based neural network that recreates GTA V so the network itself is the playable environment. He shows the results and releases the code.

David Weston's BlueHat IL 2023 talk traces the evolution of Windows security and previews Windows 11 and hardware advances. It ends with upcoming changes such as Rust in the kernel and fonts, signed binaries and adminless Windows.

Tobias Engel's 31C3 talk shows how weaknesses in the SS7 telephone signaling network let companies and attackers locate, track and manipulate phones from anywhere in the world, with precision down to about 50 meters.

Two Minute Papers covers a paper on speeding up fluid and smoke simulation with convolutional networks. It contrasts the approach with earlier regression forest methods.

A short Apple Get a Mac ad that mocks Windows Vista's constant security pop-up prompts.

Urs Hoelzle, Google's SVP of infrastructure, gives the 2012 Open Networking Summit keynote on how Google adopted OpenFlow and software-defined networking in its own networks. The slides are linked in the description.

Deviant Ollam's two-hour conference talk explains how elevators work, from the pit and buffers to the car top, controller logic and access-control features. It shows how this knowledge can be used for optimization and for bypassing building security.

Locksport historian Schuyler Towne's RVASec 2012 talk on why people lock their doors, tracing the history of locks and the assumptions about security behind them.

Eric Brandwine's AWS re:Invent 2015 session on how Amazon VPC networking works. It covers the problems the design solved, why traditional approaches do not scale, and the mechanisms used for customer isolation and VPC endpoints.

3Blue1Brown's second neural network chapter explains cost functions and gradient descent, showing how a network learns by minimizing error during training.

Geoffrey Hinton's 2025 Royal Institution Discourse on what AI has learned from biological intelligence and how it might surpass it. He explains neural networks and argues that human language use resembles what backpropagation-trained networks do.

Deviant Ollam shows that most physical attacks on doors bypass the lock, with photo and video examples of how doors, frames and hardware get defeated. It is a physical security talk from Shakacon.

A DEF CON 20 talk by RenderMan on the security weaknesses of ADS-B, the unencrypted, unauthenticated aircraft tracking broadcast. It shows how easily the data can be spoofed and what that means for security designed in too late.

Jayson E. Street's DEF CON 19 talk shows photos from real security engagements where he was already inside client facilities, illustrating how social engineering and physical intrusion can cause huge losses. For each attack he also explains what defenses would have stopped him.