Latacora, a security consultancy for startups, publishes posts on cryptography, PGP, SOC2 and building security programs.
Commenters mention it as a specialized startup security team, cite its job posts, and point to its PGP Problem post for recommendations.
Latacora | corpsec engineer | Remote | Full-time | https://www.latacora.com
If working on security at a startup is appealing, here's an opportunity to work with a whole group of startups --- in health care, in financial services, in hardware, in transportation, in AI, and even in sports analytics. You'll be a member of a growing security team with multiple practice areas, working with security veterans, talented developers just getting their start in security, and with the engineering teams of a couple dozen startups. We're consultants, in a sense, but unlike any other consulting firm I'm aware of.
Latacora builds security teams for startups. We work exclusively with startups; on average our clients are with us for 2.5 years and that number is trending up. During an engagement our whole team works on the client’s application security, cloud security, and corporate security. Once we've helped them build out a practice, we help our clients recruit someone full time to keep it running, and transition ourselves out.
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Latacora is hiring a senior Corporate Security (CorpSec) engineer to join our team and help our customers build their corporate security program to scale as they grow and address immediate threats ranging from phishing and ransomware to supply chain concerns. The Corporate Security (CorpSec) team helps growing startups with the security aspects of IT asset management, endpoint protection, mobile device management, and more, instilling solid best practices to…
- JWT algorithm is not configurable: good!
- JWT Algorithm is RS512: uggh.
Huge access tokens, slow validation AND bad security at the same time, boy we must be lucky.
- Encrypted JWT when saving sensitive information in cookie? Good start...
- ... Using Asymmetric encryption? Oh no...
- RSA-OAEP: At least it's not PKCS#1.5 amirite?
- Same RSA key is used for encryption and signature(?) Not great.
- Stateful Access Tokens: well...
I'm not sure how I feel about using stateful access tokens here at all. Since there is already a KV dependency, there are some advantages to storing stateful access tokens in the KV, most importantly you can easily revoke the tokens directly by deleting them. Revoking stateless tokens, on the other hand, is quite hard and not something that most web applications would care to implement.
The most common trade-off (and indeed, half of the raison d'être for OAuth 2.0 refresh tokens) is to have a very short-lived (e.g. 5 minutes) stateless access token and a long-lived stateful refresh token (which OpenAUTH already does). Revocation would still come with some delay, but you won't be able to use an outdated token for a long time after the user logs out or changes password. This is an acceptable trade-off for many applications, but I'm not sure if it's right to offer it as the only solution in a software package that wants to be generic: many applications will have compliance requirements that could rule out accepting logged out session tokens…
I spent twelve years as a "security guy" before becoming employee #1 at a now-wildly-successful security startup five years ago. I've spent a lot of time in the last year "professionalizing" our security program, now that we've grown large enough to need repeatable security procedures. I am intimately familiar with the domain.
Three things to segment the space:
- Clients are typically driven by compliance or practical security value. Understanding who you cater to and qualifying your customers will save a lot of pain.
- Many/most "pentesting" firms are focused on the corporate enterprise and IT people, not SaaS and dev people. Recognizing the difference in yourself and your customer needs will save a lot of pain.
- Many/most of the traditional IT enterprise security best practices & tools do not apply to a well-managed SaaS platform. e.g., I do not need a traditional vuln scanner to check for unnecessary and vulnerable services when I have one domain that's terminated at an AWS ELB.
Some industry color:
- The 2013 Target compromise root cause was not Target themselves, but their HVAC contractor who maintained trusted access. As a result, third party vendor risk assessment is becoming "standard practice" during the procurement process of any technology vendor, including SaaS applications.
- The vendor risk assessment teams expect all vendors to have mature security programs - SSAE-16 SOC2 audits, full Secure Development Lifecycle practices and customer-facing…
Latacora | Full-Time | Chicagoland, NYC Metro | Startup Security Engineer
Latacora builds and operates security teams for startups. Look at the startups hiring on this thread, and imagine running the security team for, like, a bunch of them simultaneously. That’s what we’re about. You’d want to be interested in that problem to make reading further worth your time.
We’re currently 6 security-researcher software-developers. We find groups of startups with similar technical security challenges, and then automate and systematize. Everything that’s fun about application security — crawling through the ventilation ducts of software skyscrapers like John McClane, being a scary story told to baby software developers to keep them up at night — is fun about what we do. Mix in blue-team tooling, and that’s where we are.
We’re hiring our first non-partner employee. Salaried, with benefits. Requirements: extremely interested in security, can code well in some language, willing to read and code in any language. Offices in Chicago and NYC (WFH fine, but we need to see you regularly).
What we cannot promise: a clear job description, a refined hiring process. We’re figuring that stuff out now.
What we can promise: honest and direct answers to serious inquiries regardless of your experience or perceived skill level.
jobs@latacora.com
https://www.latacora.com
It's not new, and some people would disagree on some minor elements -- but a good place to start was regularly this blog from approximately Matasano/NCC Group members, called Cryptographic Right Answers [1]. It's very clear, gives straight forward answers in clear fashion -- and with multiple opinions often aligning.
It was updated a few times, I wonder if the equivalent exists for PQ?
Edit/Update: Found the PQ one @ [2], definitely check it out!
Maybe I'm mis-remembering, but perhaps the most controversial element was the regular recommendation of AES-GCM. It certainly has excellent security properties, but also a certain brittleness re: nonces.
[1] https://www.latacora.com/blog/2018/04/03/cryptographic-right-answers/ [2] https://www.latacora.com/blog/2024/07/29/crypto-right-answers-pq/
That matches the advice from Latacora[1]. That advice makes a lot of sense from a security correctness and surface area perspective.
There's a potential developer experience and efficiency concern, though. This likely forces two deserialization operations, and therefore two big memory copies, once for deserializing the envelope and once for deserializing the inner message. If we assume that most of the outer message is the inner message, and relatively little of it is the signature or MAC, then our extra memory copy is for almost the full length of the full message.
[1]: https://www.latacora.com/blog/2019/07/24/how-not-to/