Dhole Moments, Soa Talks, and Other Bad Puns…
Programmers Don’t Understand Hash Functions
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 […]
Timing Attack on SQL Queries Through Lobste.rs Password Reset
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 […]
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.
Lightning Round
An assortment of topics that don’t quite deserve their own dedicated blog post.
Selfishness: The Pandemic We Can’t Develop a Vaccine Against
“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 Against MACs and Signatures
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 […]
Furry Amino Sucks at Art Attribution
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 […]
Blue Alerts: Security Theater and Copaganda
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 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 […]
On the Word “Nonce” in Cryptography and the UK
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 […]
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