Hacker News Reader

wolf550eon Why we don’t generate elliptic curves every day

I guess there is also the approach, not favored by cryptography engineers, which is to decide for some projects that you don't care about efficiency, you would securely combine too many primitives. Like stream chunks for bulk encryption, but each chunk uses both AES-CTR-256 and ChaCha20, both with extended nonces, and HMAC-SHA256 for MAC. The asymmetric part combines X448, P-521, Kyber-1024 and NTRUPrime-whatever, the way normal people combine X25519 with Kyber-512. If people I trust would build "tinfoilhatcrypto" this way, I would use it for some things. The environmental impact of using this for small amounts of data would probably be negligible.

wolf550eon Why we don’t generate elliptic curves every day

Every P-256 or X25519 ECDH operation uses a new ephemeral single-use key breaking which is about as hard as brute forcing AES-128. Global bitcoin hash rate is something like 90 bits per year. People think NSA doesn't have more hardware than all the bitcoin miners together. If they can break 128 bit security, they can't break it for every roundtrip in a Signal chat. I don't know what they would even use the capability to do. I don't think they need brute force to forge a Microsoft or Apple signature - easier to steal it. But it would be something high value that would be broadly useful, not a single message.

wolf550eon Global Encryption Day: Encryption's Critical Role in Safeguarding Human Rights

Eventually a private key will leak, and without forward secrecy, that private key will probably decrypt all past messages to that person, and all future messages to that person, until they give all their correspondents a new key.

With email, because people quote when replying, you'll get the other side's messages too.

Like, the simple PGP-like system where sender encrypts message using recipient's public RSA key.

And of course it's not improved by switching from RSA to ECIES.

You need to ratchet the key, or double ratchet like Signal protocol.

wolf550eon Banging errors in Go

He doesn't want to ignore the error, he wants exceptions-like behavior where the exceptions just propagate up by themselves if you don't catch them inside the function. Like Java or Python exceptions.

wolf550eon OpenBSD 7.4

Why use an old version of ffmpeg?

What is the use of ed25519 x509 TLS certs, which TLS clients support that and which CAs would sign that?

wolf550eon “Real Water” that poisoned dozens contained chemical from rocket fuel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrazine

Hydrazine is the reason for the full hazmat suits and chemical sniffers used by personnel handling loading spacecraft propellant, handling landed spacecraft [1], and even the F-16's EPU [2].

1 - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/X-37B_OT...

2 - https://media.defense.gov/2021/Jun/17/2002743830/1200/1200/0...

wolf550eon Debunking NIST's calculation of the Kyber-512 security level

This seems to be all that is publicly known about the seeds: https://saweis.net/posts/nist-curve-seed-origins.html

wolf550eon Nvidia Offices Raided by French Law Enforcement

Protection from corporate espionage

wolf550eon Making the Distribution, Part 1

> Right now, we're at the verge of releasing Gentoo Linux 1.0 (it may be available by the time you read this article on developerWorks.) But what does the future hold?

Gentoo 1.0 was released in 2002.

wolf550eon Buffer Overflows in Notepad++

I think NTFS is UCS-2, that is why WTF-8 was invented

https://simonsapin.github.io/wtf-8/

wolf550eon Inside the JVM: Arrays and how they differ from other objects

You want something like https://shipilev.net/jvm/anatomy-quarks/ (the author is a jvm maintainer, formerly at redhat now at aws).

wolf550eon Intel QuickAssist Technology Zstandard Plugin for Zstandard

It's obsolete. DEFLATE format is limited to 32KB LZ window with huffman coding.

Zstd can use a much larger window (8MB recommended) and a much better entropy coder: https://github.com/Cyan4973/FiniteStateEntropy

wolf550eon Zenbleed

The designers leave themselves an ability to override any instruction using the microcode so they can patch any instruction. They don't use the microcode only to implement complex instructions that require loops.

wolf550eon Zenbleed

Only with something like mod_asis (https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_asis.html) to serve already compressed content. Actually running zlib on every request will only make it worse.

wolf550eon Zenbleed

A Grandchild's Guide to Using Grandpa's Computer a.k.a. "If Dr. Zeuss were a Technical Writer" was written in 1994 and mentions microcode.

Microcode updates are always discussed when talking about microarchitectural security vulnerabilities (and other scary CPU errata like https://lkml.org/lkml/2023/3/8/976).

Microcode is always mentioned when discussing CPU design evolution.

wolf550eon Computational Complexity of Texture Encoding

RAD Game Tools (now part of Unreal Engine, since bought by Epic) think that game studios encode offline when "baking" the game assets, and there have been game re-releases that have smaller download than the original. See https://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2020/06/oodle-texture-slash...

The PS5 console has a decompressor for their general purpose compression format (Oodle Kraken) in hardware, and the intent is to stream textures from SSD, through general purpose decompressor, to GPU. See https://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2020/06/oodle-texture-bc7pr...

wolf550eon Nanosecond timestamp collisions are common

You can hand out uuidv4 to clients without revealing anything.

wolf550eon Gzip and KNN Outperforms Transformers on Text Classification

Even if you want to use a compression algo for this, you probably want to use lz4 with optimal parsing, you don't need the entropy coding and you don't need the checksum something like gzip (or more modern zstd) provides.

wolf550eon Don't Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company

Can you please share a link about understanding "what's going on and learn to read the room"? For real-estate and venture capital.

wolf550eon I want XAES-256-GCM/11

Because AESNI and CLMUL, AES-GCM is faster than a SIMD implementation of ChaCha20Poly1305. In theory, ChaCha20 is overkill, 8 rounds would have been enough and people do use 12 rounds for disk encryption.

wolf550eon When LIMIT 9 works but LIMIT 10 hangs

order by stored uuidv4 will get you the same rows the next time you run it. If you sample using where random() < 0.001 (or something like that) you'll get different rows each time.

wolf550eon ARM or x86? ISA Doesn’t Matter (2021)

Some libraries have x86 SIMD code but no ARM SIMD code, so benchmarking real world use cases you compare SIMD vs scalar code and x86 is much faster. Server side libraries for ARM are a less mature situation than x86.

wolf550eon Academic Ranks Explained or What on Earth Is an Adjunct?

I don't think so. There is no pipeline for them. Nobody can make a career of working temp jobs for long hours and make 15K a year. These people need to switch careers. Professional managements don't hire from among the PhDs who were unsuccessful in their academic career.

wolf550eon Academic Ranks Explained or What on Earth Is an Adjunct?

Seems it's just the 2nd in command: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provost_(education)

wolf550eon Virtual Threads Arrive in JDK 21, Ushering a New Era of Concurrency

How does virtual threads get you DPDK? How do other apps get access to the network card and the SSD if you bypass the kernel?

wolf550eon Virtual Threads Arrive in JDK 21, Ushering a New Era of Concurrency

> Now they hopefully can work around the kernel for file descriptors (network and disk) saving 30% CPU globally on all Java servers.

How does this work around the kernel? This lets you write java code that uses async IO but make it look nice, like golang code. But this isn't DPDK.

wolf550eon Near-lossless image formats using ultra-fast LZ codecs

The games industry (specifically since they were bought by Epic, Unreal engine) has stuff like RAD Oodle Texture with BC7Prep and Oodle Kraken:

https://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2020/06/oodle-texture-bc7pr...

https://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2020/09/how-oodle-kraken-an...

https://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2021/02/rate-allocation-in-...

wolf550eon Why take a compiler course? (2010)

(2010), though as relevant as ever

wolf550eon NASA ICER image compression algorithm as a C library

Video formats meant for editing (e.g. mjpeg) are a series of images (intra frame only), but video formats meant for playback (e.g. H.264, HEVC, AV1) are much more compressed, by making frames depend on other frames (inter frame). Blocks of pixels in one frame copy a block of pixels from another frame (backwards and forwards!), and apply a "diff".