Hacker News Reader

jameswryanon A quick post on Chen's algorithm

Rainbow is not a KEM, but a signature scheme.

jameswryanon Actual Uses for Near-Term Quantum Computers

> ... destroying Internet security seems like a dubious reason to build a new machine.

I can't agree with this; Destroying internet security is an excellent reason to build a new machine.

jameswryanon Random Number Generator Recommendations for Applications

/dev/random does not block when 'out of entropy'. 'Running out of entropy' isn't something that can happen, and /dev/random will only block if the RNG hasn't been initialized (short enough after boot to not matter).

See Jason Donenfeld's authoritative talk on the Linux RNG for details: https://youtu.be/-_yzaSp2xtY

jameswryanon Cryptographic Best Practices

The Discrete Log Problem is relatively simple to explain in the context of a generic group. It's sort of intuitive that elliptic curve groups are a pretty good instance of a generic group. So I don't think it is simpler to explain the security of RSA than the security of ECC.

Additionally, the best attack on ECDLP (Pollard's rho) is much easier to understand than the best attack on RSA (the number field sieve).

jameswryanon FBI is warning people against using public phone-charging stations

That isn't sufficient to protect you on a charger you don't control: https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity21/presentat...

jameswryanon ELF hash function may overflow

For the cryptography & theory? https://toc.cryptobook.us/

For the design and internals of hash functions? The finalists for the SHA3 competition have extensive design documentation. There's an archive at https://web.archive.org/web/20170829225940/http://csrc.nist....

Cryptographic hash functions are designed to resist existing attacks, so you'll want an understanding of differential & linear cryptanalysis, as well as a variety of algebraic attacks. I don't know of a good textbook on the subject, so you might find yourself searching keywords on https://eprint.iacr.org/

jameswryanon Will Carbon Replace C++?

> And C++ just... doesn't have that many real problems.

70% of security bugs are memory safety issues. That's a lot of real problems.

> It has a lot of irks, but the problems people run into are problems that others already solved, a thousand times, over the last half century, in many different ways for many different iterations of the language.

People run into memory safety issues more often in new C++ code.

https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/memory-safet...

https://security.googleblog.com/2021/09/an-update-on-memory-...

https://github.com/microsoft/MSRC-Security-Research/blob/mas...

https://media.defense.gov/2022/Nov/10/2003112742/-1/-1/0/CSI...

https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2030/DEF%20CON%2030%20pre...

https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/research/report-future-...

https://alexgaynor.net/2020/may/27/science-on-memory-unsafet...

https://github.com/google/sanitizers/blob/master/hwaddress-s...

https://security.googleblog.com/2022/12/memory-safe-language...

jameswryanon NIST selects ‘lightweight cryptography’ algorithms to protect small devices

Joan Daemen even lost twice in one competition! Subterranean 2.0, another Duplex, didn't make it past round 2.