An introduction to database cryptography.
Author: Soatok
Security engineer with a fursona. Ask me about dholes or Diffie-Hellman!
A quick reference to anti-furry dog-whistles for busy journalists and investigative reporters.
Tails from the Cryptographic Side of Security Research
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Hindsight is 2022
A recap of this blog and its author in 2022
Ever since the famous “Open Sesame” line from One Thousand and One Nights, humanity was doomed to suffer from the scourge of passwords. Even in a world where we use hardware tokens with asymmetric cryptography to obviate the need for passwords in modern authentication protocols, we’ll still need to include “something you know” for legal […]
When it comes to AES-GCM, I am not a fan. Most of my gripes fall into one of two categories: However, one of my gripes technically belongs in both categories: The small nonce size, which is caused by AES’s block size, limits the amount of data you can safely encrypt with a single symmetric key. […]
I got banned for criticizing Twitter’s security, as I’ve done often in the past without repercussion.
As Twitter’s new management continues to nosedive the platform directly into the ground, many people are migrating to what seem like drop-in alternatives; i.e. Cohost and Mastodon. Some are even considering new platforms that none of us have heard of before (one is called “Hive”). Needless to say, these are somewhat chaotic times. One topic […]
What will become of the Internet, and the furry fandom, if Elon Musk kills Twitter?
A nuanced answer to the obvious question in response to Patreon firing an entire Security Team in 2022.
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Hobbies Don’t Need to be Policed
We don’t need stupid rules about fursuiting at furry conventions
Cryptographic agility is a vaguely defined property, but is commonly understood to mean, “Able to quickly swap between cryptographic primitives in response to new attacks.” Wikipedia defines cryptographic agility as: Cryptographic agility is a practice paradigm in designing information security protocols and standards in a way so that they can support multiple cryptographic primitives and […]
feat. Vikram Sharma of QuintessenceLabs
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Introducing Cupcake
Form generating and processing library for PHP 8 projects
On Puriteens, Furries, and the future of the LGBTQIA+ Community
and Got Banned for Doing the Right Thing
A cartoon wild canid on the Internet provides general guidance on elliptic curve cryptography parameter choices.
Obviously, no, he wasn’t. But facts aren’t likely to change the minds of people who are already motivated to hate furries.
One bad furry doesn’t spoil hundreds of thousands of bunches.
Do public schools really have a secret “furry protocol” to allow K-12 students that identify as cats to use litter boxes in restrooms? No.
If your first instinct upon reading the title of this blog post was the Ctrl+F for the words “SJW”, “woke”, or “cancel culture”, you’re already assuming incorrectly about this post and the author’s positions. If “please don’t do that” is asking too much, maybe sit this one out? We like to think we live in […]
If you really must support RSA in 2022, here’s some things to keep in mind.
The Furry Fandom proved vital to saving a library from the demands of a homophobic Mississippi politician.
Who knew Hybrid Cryptography (which combines Post-Quantum Cryptography with Pre-Quantum Cryptography) would be controversial?
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Don’t Dunk the Gunk
How to Avoid Accidentally Amplifying Assholes on Twitter
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How to Remove Twitter Spaces
How to get rid of the Twitter feature nobody asked for, that takes up the top part of your screen, and nobody can dismiss.
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For Your Infurmation
A recap of Dhole Moments in the year 2021.
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Understanding HKDF
HKDF has poorly-understood subtleties. Let’s explore them in detail.
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My Blog Isn’t a Platform for Internet Randos
Clearly explaining the Dhole Moments content policy.
Threema boldly claims to be more secure than Signal. Does this hold up to scrutiny?
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Against Web3 and Faux-Decentralization
Despite the hype, Web3 offers fake decentralization and builds upon technology you could build without cryptocurrency.
In A Furry’s Guide to Cryptocurrency, I briefly mentioned that NFTs are a dumb idea and not a valid reason for anyone–but especially furries–to get involved with cryptocurrency. The legitimate reasons for furries to consider cryptocurrency are to protect porn artists and sex workers from the overreach of the conservative finance sector. To bank the […]
Crackpot cryptography, overconfidence, and attempts to defraud governments and private-sector startups.
Programmers don’t understand hash functions, and I can demonstrate this to most of the people that will read this with a single observation: When you saw the words “hash function” in the title, you might have assumed this was going to be a blog post about password storage. (Passwords are the most common knee-jerk reaction […]
Just to assuage any panic, let me state this up front. If you’re reading this blog post wondering if your Lobste.rs account is at risk, good news: I didn’t publish it until after the vulnerability was mitigated, so you’re safe. You don’t need to change your passwords or anything. This write-up is purely for education […]
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Safer Illinois, Isn’t
Wherein some furry casually saves a University tens of thousands of dollars on a NIST SP 800-171 audit they were doomed to fail anyway.
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Lightning Round
An assortment of topics that don’t quite deserve their own dedicated blog post.
“You’re going to love this, trust me. What you’re seeing now is my normal state. This is a super-spreader. And this… This is what is known as a super-spreader that has ascended above a super-spreader. Or, you could just call this a super-spreader two. AND THIS. AND THIS IS TO GO EVEN FURTHER BEYOND!!” 2021 […]
Canonicalization Attacks occur when a protocol that feeds data into a hash function used in a Message Authentication Code (MAC) or Digital Signature calculation fails to ensure some property that’s expected of the overall protocol. The textbook example of a canonicalization attack is the length-extension attack against hash functions such as MD5–which famously broke the […]
Over the weekend, I decided to make an account on Furry Amino. My reasoning at the time was, “A lot of furries lurk there, I should see what it’s about.” That was a bad move that I’d like to discourage others from making. What’s Furry Amino? Furry Amino is a furry-centric community on the Amino […]
Last week, Floridians were startled by an emergency alert sent to all of our cell phones. Typically when this sort of alert happens, it’s an Amber Alert, which means a child was abducted. In Florida, we sometimes also receive Silver Alerts, which indicates that an Alzheimer’s or dementia patient has gone missing. (Florida has a […]
A question I often get–especially from cryptography experts: What is it with furries and Telegram? No, they’re almost certainly not talking about that. Most furries use Telegram to keep in touch with other members of our community. This leads many to wonder, “Why Telegram of all platforms?” The answer is simple: Stickers. Telegram was the […]
Earlier today, I made a Twitter shitpost that confused a lot of folks from the UK. Now, anyone can be forgiven for not knowing what AES-GCM-SIV is, or for being confused by the grammar of the meme. But the source of confusion was the word “nonce”. Let’s talk about what the word “nonce” means in […]
Previously on Dead Ends in Cryptanalysis, we talked about length-extension attacks and precisely why modern hash functions like SHA-3 and BLAKE2 aren’t susceptible. The art and science of side-channel cryptanalysis is one of the subjects I’m deeply fascinated by, and it’s something you’ll hear me yap about a lot on this blog in the future. […]
Briefly explaining the Infursec prevalence within InfoSec
Responding to “Our cybersecurity ‘industry best practices’ keep allowing breaches”
An Internet Marketer Offered Me $100 to Betray Myself and My Community
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World Dhole Day 2021
Join us on May 28 for World Dhole Day in support of the Dhole Conservation Fund.
#WhyIGotVaxxed
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Against Hierarchies
One of the funniest concepts for a YouTube channel has to be TierZoo, which treats the animal kingdom as an MMORPG and animal species as different classes within this hypothetical game, and then proceeds to analyze it the same way gamers analyze the “meta” for a given season of a game. Tier lists are just […]