[Haseeb] failed the marshmallow test as a kid. He has no self-control. He wastes a great deal of time on reddit. There is a solution to this issue — just lock yourself out of your account. The process is simple, as well as all you requirement to do is modification your password to something random, modification the healing email address, as well as click submit. In the blink of an eye, all your imaginary Web points vanish.

That’s the one guaranteed way to stop reddit. However, [Haseeb] wished to hold onto those magic Web points in the event they ended up being worth something. This led to a far more baroque solution. He discovered a service that would email him at a later date, send an email to himself containing a random password, as well as stop reddit temporarily. up until that email was delivered, he was officially off reddit. When that email was received, efficiency would stop.

A few years pass, as well as [Haseeb] had a long time to kill at his new job. He decided to scrounge up his old password, only to find he locked himself out of his Reddit account up until 2018. What complied with is a security exploit of an ’email me in the future’ service, as well as a fantastic example of exactly how much effort one person will dedicate to a lifetime of immediate gratification.

The email service in concern is LetterMeLater, a site that will send an email at some arbitrary point in the future. You can hide the body of the email from yourself, making this a relatively great solution of what [Haseeb] is doing. He was still locked out of his email, though, as well as emailing the people running LetterMeLater seemed absurd. Dopamine is fun, though, as well as [Haseeb] ultimately discovered a workaround. This site indexes the body of an email for search. This is great, since the body of the email this site would send [Haseeb] in 2018 contained his reddit password as well as only his reddit password. With a bit bit of code, he can perform substring queries on an email he can’t read. Now, extracting the password is just a very first year CS homework problem.

At this point, the only thing [Haseeb] understands about his password is that it’s a long string of random characters that probably doesn’t include upper-case characters. That’s 26 possible characters, 10 possible numbers, as well as a character bank that can be determined by browsing his email one character at a time. [Haseeb] is essentially playing Hangman against his former self here.

After figuring out an API for LetterMeLater, [Haseeb] whipped up a quick bit of code that discovers the password by browsing substrings. It’s gorgeous as well as recursive, although he did break it down into discovering a suffix of the password then determining the remainder of the password. It took 443 iterations of the code to discover the password, as well as when that was total he logged into reddit. math works, although [Haseeb] will have to figure out a method to wean himself off the opiate of the millennials again.