Top all-time · #1910
Elie Bursztein
Personal blog · elie.net/blogsecurityai
Elie Bursztein writes Elie on AI and Cybersecurity, a personal blog at elie.net about security and ai. Since 2014, 38 different Hacker News readers have linked it 78 times, most often “Fuller House: Exposing high-end poker cheating devices (2016)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (10) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for security and anti-abuse research posts, such as the Hearthstone bot work, barcoded playing-card cheating devices, and card-game cheating analysis.
- Recommended for · 1 comments
- Described as a fascinating talk on silicon-level side-channel attacks.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 10 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Explore Elie Bursztein's research on AI and cybersecurity: open-access papers, conference talks, latest projects, podcasts, and in-depth technical articles.
Most-linked posts?
- Fuller House: Exposing high-end poker cheating devices (2016)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-06-14
- Understanding the safety and privacy challenges faced by South Asian women3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-06-07
- Attacks against machine learning – an overview2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-05-31
- Hacking Hearthstone with machine learning – Defcon talk wrap-up2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-09-02
- The bleak picture of two-factor authentication adoption in the wild2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-12-21
- Deep-learning based side-channel attacks with TensorFlow tutorial2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-06-06
- A Hacker Guide to Deep-Learning Based AES Side Channel Attacks2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-08-10
- Exposing high-end poker cheating devices2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-10-22
- Deep-learning side-channel attacks: the theory2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-05-22
What Hacker News says?
But this all hinges on the naive assumptions that this is a one off and will never happen again, and that later generation devices are immune from any circumvention attempt. History says this isn't how this plays out. If you crack the encryption once you'll get orders to crack it again and again, and in much lower profile and lower stake cases. Look at the prevalence of espionage tactics such as Stingrays and "paral…
Comment linking /blog/security/what-tools-do-the-fbi-use-when-seizing-computers-or-the-curious-case-of-the-mouse-jiggler-device
on “A Message to Our Customers”Submitted Exposing high-end poker cheating devices as a story · 637 points
HN discussionHere's an article from 2017 talking about this class of devices: https://elie.net/blog/security/fuller-house-exposing-high-en...
Comment linking /blog/security/fuller-house-exposing-high-end-poker-cheating-devices/
on “The Nettle Magic Project: Scanner for decks of cards with bar codes on edges”Submitted Attacks against machine learning – an overview as a story · 328 points
HN discussionAlready done, sort of. Blizzard was not amused, as botting makes the game less fun, so it wasnt released. https://elie.net/blog/hearthstone/i-am-a-legend-hacking-hear...
Comment linking /blog/hearthstone/i-am-a-legend-hacking-hearthstone-with-machine-learning-defcon-talk-wrap-up
on “OpenAI Five Benchmark: Results”Submitted What are malicious USB keys and how to create a realistic one? as a story · 124 points
HN discussionGoogle's Elie Burzstein and Jean Michel Picod gave a fascinating talk at Defcon last week about silicon-level SCAs: https://elie.net/talk/a-hackerguide-to-deep-learning-based-s... Disclosure: also work at G.
Comment linking /talk/a-hackerguide-to-deep-learning-based-side-channel-attacks/
on “Nvidia CEO says Google is the only customer building its own silicon at scale”Submitted Hacking Hearthstone with machine learning – Defcon talk wrap-up as a story · 118 points
HN discussionYou can also get cheating devices [1] where the edges of all the cards are printed with IR barcodes, then a special camera (concealed in a modified phone or car key fob) can tell you upcoming cards by looking at the edge of the deck. Of course, you need to convince people to play with your deck of cards first, so you can't just walk into a casino with these things. [1] https://www.elie.net/blog/security/fuller-house…
Comment linking /blog/security/fuller-house-exposing-high-end-poker-cheating-devices
on “Berlin police find radioactive iodine on playing cards”Submitted Insights on the First Three Years of the Right to Be Forgotten at Google as a story · 110 points
HN discussionThe interesting thing to me is what exactly Blizzard Entertainment said that prompted the author of this blog post (a Google research lead) to decide not to release the utility that at Defcon he said he would. Excerpt: "Following Defcon we had a series of conversations with the Hearthstone team about our research... they were very concerned that our real time dashboard that can predict your opponent’s deck will brea…
Comment linking /blog/hearthstone/how-to-appraise-hearthstone-card-values
on “Hacking Hearthstone with machine learning – Defcon talk wrap-up”Submitted Fuller House: Exposing high-end poker cheating devices (2016) as a story · 91 points
HN discussionElie Bursztein leads Google's anti-abuse research, and recently mentioned on Google+ that he moved his personal web site to GAE: http://www.elie.net/ I can load his GAE-hosted web site in ~300ms, and there's a useful performance box on the right sidebar of his site that breaks down how long each component takes to load on GAE: $ time curl http://www.elie.net/ > /dev/null % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time…
Comment linking /
on “Free static page hosting on Google App Engine in minutes”Submitted The bleak picture of two-factor authentication adoption in the wild as a story · 83 points
HN discussionHi, I put together a newsletter called Interesting Things that curates 40+ interesting stories and links every week about tech with a splash of business and science. Looking through the past few editions, there has been an average of one AI/deep-learning/neural-network related article per week: Issue #001 Shedding light on fairness in AI with a new data set — Facebook publishes a dataset of of 45,186 human face-to-f…
Comment linking /blog/security/hacker-guide-to-deep-learning-side-channel-attacks-the-theory/
on “Ask HN: What are your favorite AI blogs?”Submitted Taking down Gooligan, an Android botnet as a story · 75 points
HN discussionIt doesn't need to be a sex toy, obviously. $5 worth of parts from Ali Baba could be assembled into a signaling tool: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Type-C-Bluetooth-5-0-... There's even prebuilt solutions for things like poker: https://www.cardslenses.com/remote-contorl-poker-game-vibrat... https://elie.net/blog/security/royal-flush-an-in-depth-look-...
Comment linking /blog/security/royal-flush-an-in-depth-look-at-poker-cheating-devices-accessories/
on “Chess grandmaster Hans Niemann denies using vibrating sex toy to cheat”Submitted Password checkup: from 0 to 650k users in 20 days as a story · 73 points
HN discussionhttps://elie.net mostly about the research we do at Google. Generated statically and hosted on firebase. The design was custom made for it.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Share Your Personal Site”Submitted Quantifying the impact of the Twitter fake accounts purge – a technical analysis as a story · 60 points
HN discussionSubmitted Deep-learning side-channel attacks: the theory as a story · 42 points
HN discussionSubmitted Account Security – A Divided User Perception as a story · 21 points
HN discussionSubmitted Full(er) House: Exposing high-end poker cheating devices as a story · 9 points
HN discussionSubmitted Challenges faced while training an AI to combat abuse as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSubmitted Attacks against machine learning – an overview as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted How to harness AI to combat fraud and abuse as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted I am a legend – hacking Hearthstone using statistical learning methods as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Show HN: Local RAG with Ollama, Gemma and RETSim as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Deep-learning based side-channel attacks with TensorFlow tutorial as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Hacker Guide to Deep-Learning Based AES Side Channel Attacks as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
