Security engineer with a fursona. Ask me about dholes or Diffie-Hellman!
Earlier this week, NIST announced Round 3 of the Post-Quantum Cryptography project and published their rationale for selecting from the Round 2 candidates. NIST did something clever this time, and Round 3 was separated into two groups: Finalists and Alternative Candidates. Finalists are algorithms that NIST (and the majority of the cryptographers involved in NIST’s […]
This is a bit different from my usual blog post, insofar as I don’t have much of a point except that I’m tired of repeating myself. The other day, I was frustrated about Pinterest clogging up the Google Image Search results and tweeted a really simple and well-known life-hack to counteract their search engine manipulation. […]
I recently needed to find an image that I didn’t have saved on my computer in order to share with a group chat. For laughs. Naturally, I did the first thing most of us do when that happens: I typed the query into Google’s Image Search. To my dismay, all of the first results were […]
Historical Context of Iota’s Hash Functions Once upon a time, researchers discovered that the hash function used within the Iota cryptocurrency (Curl-P), was vulnerable to practical collisions. When pressed about this, the Iota Foundation said the following: In response to this research, the Iota developers threatened to sue the researchers. Iota replaced Curl-P-27 with a […]
There seems to be a lot of interest among software developers in the various cryptographic building blocks (block ciphers, hash functions, etc.), and more specifically how they stack up against each other. Today, we’re going to look at how some symmetric encryption methods stack up against each other. If you’re just looking for a short […]
Sometimes my blog posts end up on social link-sharing websites with a technology focus, such as Lobste.rs or Hacker News. On a good day, this presents an opportunity to share one’s writing with a larger audience and, more importantly, solicit a wider variety of feedback from one’s peers. However, sometimes you end up with feedback […]
If you see the letters GNU in a systems design, and that system intersects with cryptography, I can almost guarantee that it will be badly designed to an alarming degree. This is as true of GnuPG (and PGP in general) as it is of designs like the proposed GNU Name System (IETF draft) and cryptographic […]
There are a lot of random topics I’ve wanted to write about since I started Dhole Moments, and for one reason or another, haven’t actually written about. I know from past experience with other projects that if you don’t occasionally do some housekeeping, your backlog eventually collapses under its own gravity and you can never […]
Rhyner has published a guide to chatting with furries and overcoming one’s anxiety and self-doubt. If you have a hard time starting up a conversation with furries, you’ll certainly find this helpful. Note that not all conversations have the same flow, and you definitely shouldn’t force yourself into the confines of [a] template structure. Keep […]
As America prepares for record-breaking infection statistics on a daily basis, many of us are looking at other countries safely reopening and wondering, “Why can’t we have nice things?” Of course, everyone has their favorite target to blame for this catastrophe. Democrats blame Republicans. Republicans blame Democrats. I’m not interested in blame. Regardless of who […]
