str👻d

I am a professional cryptographic engineer. I regularly open my Calculator app to check that 32 * 8 still equals 256.

Yes. The code I ship has a significant risk of user-loss-of-funds from a bug in the wrong place. It remains negligent to develop critical consensus or wallet code solely with AI output and review. Even with the model improvements this year, it's insufficient assurance for a strong security posture.

This is why in my job area (cryptographic protocols) I'm trying to apply LLMs in ways that are self-reinforcing: Lean proofs, review pipelines, forcing precise specifications... If attacking is ~free, attack the spec or code as it is being written.

The macOS built-in curl, git, pip, python3, perl, ruby, and openssl all read /etc/ssl/cert.pem, which still has the emSign root, but they don't check revocation like Apple's Secure Transport libraries. This is, uh, a problem. git and pip especially. I added a short-term workaround to this page.

I cannot unsubscribe from marketing emails today because of the number 4.

I would be very cautious about using non-browser tools over Tor right now, before confirming they are updated or rebuilt. For very good privacy reasons, DNS resolution is done at the exit node. But that means a malicious exit node can now trivially swap in malicious IPs for any TLS-secured service.

🚨 Six WebPKI Intermediate CAs are compromised. This is bigger than Heartbleed, but a client-side issue. Anything that verifies certificates against public roots, like most TLS clients, is/was affected. Details, live test, patched versions and workarounds at emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com Act now.

Me at 1am: "Wow, the twins have slept for 5 hours straight, this is great! Time for their mid-night feed." Next three hours: if I'm not bouncing them, they are wide awake.

Publishing “Cryptographic Right Answers” for developers is a tradition by now. Colin Percival started in 2009, Thomas Ptacek followed up in 2015, and then Latacora carried on in 2018 and 2024. I put together a list updated for the renewed urgency of migrating to post-quantum algorithms.

My life right now:

The main reason I'd want Polytoken to be open-source at this stage is to figure out why certain things don't work. Fortunately, it has a /feedback command and a very responsive developer, so I can just keep throwing my observations in there instead and forget about them.

Optimist: The cup is half full Pessimist: The cup is half empty Cryptographic engineer: Your RNG is broken, that's not a uniform distribution.

Happy Zero Cool Day y'all

Are you at DEF CON? Do you have a spare TV or monitor? Please let @dwangoac.tas.bot know. He needs one for the Game Hacking Village.

Excellent article, and very interesting to read. I find it amusing that this paragraph of Chatrie is "head-scratching" from a legal perspective, when to me (both as a regular user and a professional privacy engineer) this is a pretty straightforward way to map physical privacy onto digital privacy.

If a technology *can* be abused, it *will* be abused. This goes doubly for those in positions of power. Technology policy can be difficult, but we should never lose sight of this fact.

Film you've watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode: no Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, Marvel, Disney, or Ghibli.

Bob DyLean: A Framework for the Symbolic Analysis of Cryptographic Protocols in Lean (Théophile Wallez, Cas Cremers) ia.cr/2026/1493

fucking cryptographers

Finally

luv 2 think I'll make a quick release of a project with a new feature, and instead end up having to cut multiple bugfix releases as I find things I missed several years ago 🫠

That was fun! I've played similar games before but not that allowed using letters multiple times; that took a bit for my brain to route through.

I don't get why anybody is listening to Jacob Applebaum. My cat has about the same expertise in cryptography, and has never been credibly accused of sexual abuse. She's also a lot cuter.

oh noooooo

That was exhausting just to watch!

I am not normally a football person, but games like this one are quite exceptional.

What a race.

Every time I think I'm getting a handle on the bounds of what an AI model can handle on its own, it makes a fuckup significant enough to force me to stop what it's doing and continue hand-holding it. And I have no idea whether or not this is due to the provider making their model dumber on the fly.

Did anyone set up an image/video post labeller trained on Mango Mussolini's face (and his associated cabinet)? @aendra.com maybe you have leads (or know of XBlock derivatives)?

Interesting artifact of the way @bsky.app does embeds: because they are stored in the post itself (via an app.bsky.embed.external record), they don't change when the article itself changes (e.g. this article has been retracted).

I was *certain* the images in the quoted post were GIFs of an old CRT recording until I tapped them. @bsky.app you got a stylesheet bug somewhere, your gallery is vibing a bit too hard.

Your periodic reminder that people are *more* abusive online when they're using their "real names" than when they're using a persistent pseudonym and this effect has been replicated in literally every study that has ever been done

The ancient contracts call us forth once more.

They're raising a white flag at the Kennedy center.

It's 5:30am in the UK and I am still watching. This is my World Cup.

The privacy risks (very nicely outlined herein) are one of the core motivations for the personal assistant system I'm currently building for myself. That and I really want the hackability I get from a system I fully control (Per-task encrypted secrets? Seamless local models? Cyberdeck integration?)

"nudity today, political speech tomorrow" In five words, @signal.org has given a more trenchant critique of government surveillance tech than 99% of UK legislators, pundits, and NGOs.

Fun quirk: the app.bsky.embed.images Lexicon allows at most 4 images, so this post uses a new app.bsky.embed.gallery Lexicon without that restriction. The old app doesn't know about the new Lexicon, so it doesn't show any images. Would be nice to instead see "update your app to view this content".

Ooh, another bad Claude Code permissions failure mode from @anthropic.com: requests are a stack (LIFO) instead of a queue (FIFO). You can be in the act of pressing Enter after reviewing a request, when another request takes over the permissions UI (frequent with ultracode), and steals the approval.