HKDF has poorly-understood subtleties. Let’s explore them in detail.
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Understanding HKDF
Author: Soatok
Security engineer with a fursona. Ask me about dholes or Diffie-Hellman!
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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?
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 […]
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A Furry’s Guide to Telegram
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 […]
Normally when you see an article that talks about cryptocurrency come across your timeline, you can safely sort it squarely into two camps: For and Against. If you’re like me, you might even make a game out of trying to classify it into one bucket or the other from the first paragraph–sort of like how […]
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The Furry / Sexuality Blog Post
Sexuality and the Furry Fandom.
I’m not going to mince words on this one. No, it’s not just you. No, it’s not your fault. No, nobody knows what to do about it. Recently, a lot of furry artists and content creators have expressed a sentiment of frustration and listlessness with their own work. (Both privately and publicly.) This is usually […]
How and why XSalsa20/XChaCha were designed, and why they’re secure.
The technology industry is hurt at every level by toxic gatekeeping.
Cryptographers and cryptography engineers love to talk about the latest attacks and how to mitigate them. LadderLeak breaks ECDSA with less than 1 bit of nonce leakage? Raccoon attack brings the Hidden Number attack to finite field Diffie-Hellman in TLS? And while this sort of research is important and fun, most software developers have much […]
Boycott Zed Shaw’s writing. (With bonus zero-days in his work.)
Tales from the Crypt[ography].
The fatal flaw of Birdwatch’s current design and how it can be fixed.
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No, You’re Not a “Sigma Male”
“Sigma Male” is just the latest trend in pick-up artist/involuntary celibate/anti-feminist grifting.
RSA is for encrypting symmetric keys, not entire messages. Pass it on.
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Welcome to the Furry Fandom
Welcome to the furry fandom, please enjoy your stay! ^w^
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Block Cipher Structures: Ranked
An opinionated curation of different classes of block ciphers, ranked by an opinionated furry.
The server for thedonald.win is hosted at 167.114.145.140. Read on to learn how I discovered this.
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The Story So Fur
A recap of Dhole Moments in the year 2020.
As we look upon the sunset of a remarkably tiresome year, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about cryptographic wear-out. What is cryptographic wear-out? It’s the threshold when you’ve used the same key to encrypt so much data that you should probably switch to a new key before you encrypt any more. Otherwise, […]
Earlier tonight, someone decided to change their Twitter handle and display name to impersonate a furry and solicit money to the scammer’s PayPal account. This is the same kind of lazy technique that script kiddies use to phish people for passwords, but more targeted. The goal is to dupe someone into sending the scammer money […]
Vega of Opinionated Guides (OpGuides for short) recently asked to interview me for their website hosted on Github Pages. You can read the interview here if that strikes your fancy. Opinionated Guides is a quite excellent learning resource for various topics ranging from engineering to art, music, and philosophy. One thing I really like about […]
Imagine you’re a software developer, and you need to authenticate users based on a username and password. If you’re well-read on the industry standard best practices, you’ll probably elect to use something like bcrypt, scrypt, Argon2id, or PBKDF2. (If you thought to use something else, you’re almost certainly doing it wrong.) Let’s say, due to […]
Governments are back on their anti-encryption bullshit again. Between the U.S. Senate’s “EARN IT” Act, the E.U.’s slew of anti-encryption proposals, and Australia’s new anti-encryption law, it’s become clear that the authoritarians in office view online privacy as a threat to their existence. Normally, when the governments increase their anti-privacy sabre-rattling, technologists start talking more […]
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Deplatforming Hate and Harassment
How to more effectively report abuse to social media companies like Twitter.
We’ve more-or-less all been coping with the pandemic since early March. During this time, I’ve seen a lot of people stressed and depressed to their breaking points, usually while also blaming themselves for not being able to bottle their feelings up and believing no one else is at their limit. And that’s simply not true. […]
Earlier this week, security researcher Ryan Castellucci published a blog post with a somewhat provocative title: DKIM: Show Your Privates. After reading the ensuing discussions on Hacker News and Reddit about their DKIM post, it seems clear that the importance of deniability in online communications seems to have been broadly overlooked. Security Goals, Summarized When […]
Zoom recently announced that they were going to make end-to-end encryption available to all of their users–not just customers. This is a good move, especially for people living in countries with inept leadership that failed to address the COVID-19 pandemic and therefore need to conduct their work and schooling remotely through software like Zoom. I […]
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Solving For “Why?”
Why blog about cryptography as a furry?
If living through the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything–and it surely hasn’t–it would be the importance of friendship and community to our physical and emotional well-being. For more on the subject of People Who Ought to Know Better Not Learning the Obvious Lessons from Misfortune, one needs look no further than social media. Popularity […]
A frequent source of confusion in the furry fandom is about commission pricing for furry art. This confusion is often driven by (usually younger) furries demanding free or severely cheap art from artists, and the aftermath of such exchanges. There’s a reason @SpicyFurryTakes posts so frequently. In the interest of not adding to the confusion, […]
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