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Comment by 0des | Hacker News Reader

Well, for one, iirc Secp256r1 was pseudo random and can be seen glowing in broad daylight.

From here[1], even the two a,b values seem suspicious:

k curve

  a = 0
  b = 7

r curve

  a = FFFFFFFF 00000001 00000000 00000000 00000000 FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFC
  b = 5AC635D8 AA3A93E7 B3EBBD55 769886BC 651D06B0 CC53B0F6 3BCE3C3E 27D2604B

[1]https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2018/08/21/a-tale-of-two-elli...

Glowing...is this metaphorical or some industry term?

Saying that something 'glows in the dark' implies interference, so unfortunately, within cryptography, it has become an industry term as well as metaphor.

Other examples are the 'mystery padding' in keccak vs sha3.

I read the 3 replies and I still don't know what glowing means in cryptographic terms. I even tried to google it with cryptography added but nothing.

It means that the designer may have inserted an unpublished weakness. See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing-up-my-sleeve_number

As in the case of Keccak and SHA3, it doesn't necessarily have to be the designer, it can also be the reviewing committee.

It's probably metaphorical, to mean distinguishable ?! And the term has never been used in crypto

It's imageboard/IRC slang, you won't find any documentation on it because it's an intentionally obfuscated/dogwhistle phrase intended to only 'make sense' to other browsers who've stuck around long enough to get spoonfed.

Using the term 'dogwhistle' seems like a divisive way to discount what I said. Do you care to articulate yourself in a way that addresses the actual substance of what I said, or is this it?

Glowing is not cryptographic jargon. It's a word used years ago by the developer of TempleOS in a livestream to describe CIA operators. He said he could tell who was CIA because they would glow in the dark. Users of the 4chan technology board witnessed this and it became a meme.

To say something glows means to suggest the US three letter agencies are interfering with it. If some cryptography glows, it means it's been compromised by US authorities. Glowies are the operators themselves.

Agreed that "dogwhistle" is lowkey pejorative. I prefer "shibboleth".

"Glowing" means that it's probably a plot of a government. It's not cryptography-specific.

Isn't Keccak SHA3?

no, keccak is keccak, sha3 is keccak with NIST's mystery padding added in.

Oh huh, I didn't know that, thanks. Sounds like nothing fishy is going on, definitely not.

I’ve never heard a cryptographer use “glow-in-the-dark” when talking about potentially fishy schemes.

Source: am cryptographer

I work with a decent group of academic and industry cryptographers, and I’ve never heard any of them use the term (even as a joke.)

My main familiarity with it is from imageboard culture, where (mostly) reactionaries use it to accuse each other of being feds.

> Saying that something 'glows in the dark' implies interference

Given that "glows in the dark" typically refers to fluorescence[1], where does the interference comes in?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorescence

I know that some cryptography protocols have intermediate results that need to be deleted. This is sometimes referred to as 'radioactive waste'

It's a reference to schizophrenic Terry Davis (rip), author of TempleOS, who said CIA agents would glow in the dark, and got popularized through the 4chan /g/ board.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Glows%20in%2...

weird intersection of the internet.

Terry is/was an HN native, too.

Upvoting all of his shadowbanned stuff that was half-way decent and lucid was a hobby of mine. It still makes me feel good to think about it.

Godspeed Terry.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7818823

I vouched for a few of his comments as well. I definitely think about how a quirk of biology or environment could flip the wrong switch in my brain.

There are millions of sob stories. I don't do as much as I could, but I do more than nothing to help people out. That one, Terry Davis, keeps me up at night sometimes.

Hindsight is 20/20, all we can do is learn for next time.

I watched some of his live streams, saw some cool things but man the things he would say

If we were not meant to distinguish creation from creator, we'd be in a world of trouble. Also, he was quite ill, I'm not sure we can fault him for some of his mannerisms while also admiring his ambition and skill.

fwiw:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=losethos

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TerryADavis

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TempleOS

Glowie refers to a fed, it started with the templeos guy but is more general now. Glowing means its a fed op to weaken crypto, kinda like the dual ec fiasco.

They're saying they don't trust that the constants defining the curve were chosen non-maliciously. The NSA has, in the past, standardized protocols that contained intentional backdoors embedded into the constants used in the definition [1]. Because of things like that, it's desirable for cryptographic protocols to use constants chosen in some way that makes backdooring intractable [2].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing-up-my-sleeve_number

It’s from this t-shirt:

https://www.reddit.com/r/lastimages/comments/2obp6s/last_kno...

Later the phrase was seen on a t-shirt in a candid photo of a very attractive Japanese woman posted to engrish.com, and went viral.

Then 4chan picked it up.

And now it’s here.

4chan's technology board were, let's say, huge fans of Terry Davis, developer of TempleOS. One day during his livestream he said he could see the CIA operators while driving because they would glow in the dark.

Now whenever someone is suspected of being an intelligence agency operator, people reply with pictures of a literal glowing person. Usually happens when someone spreads FUD about technology that's believed to be secure. It is assumed that these agencies are running psychological operations in online communites with the intent to dissuade the use of technology that could defeat them.

Glowing in the dark is something people say when they refer to people from intelligence services. The idea is they stick out when doing dark/stealthy stuff.

“Glows” for something tampered with or “glowies”for agents of three letter agencies doing the tampering is an imageboard culture term first coined by Terry Davis (1969-2018), the iconic developer of TempleOS, who made the probably fantastical but apparently not metaphorical claim that he could distinguish CIA agents from regular people because CIA agents “glowed in the dark”.

After it’s controversial debut on 4chan, Davis’s unsupported claim of selective unexplained human photoluminescence quickly became a meme in imageboard culture. Since imageboard culture is intersectional with software development culture, the terms have worked their way into defacto terminology among a subset of developers that work on things often thought of as adversarial at times to state interests, encrypted chat and cryptocurrency being among these.

The term has bled out some and finds spotty support among other developers in tangential contact. The future of the term is uncertain, as it’s use remains largely isolated despite being canonical since 2017.

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