Analysis on the 2021 Natanz attacks from someone who responded to Stuxnet — In the early morning of April 11th, 2021 an explosion rocked the desert surrounding Natanz, a nuclear enrichment facility within Iran’s nuclear power infrastructure. …

CAVP, CMVP, FIPS 140–3, and why we need a better way to measure good cryptography with ideally less acronyms — Cryptography is critical to protecting our information online. In a pandemic-wracked world where companies and countries are being forced at gunpoint into the digital age, figuring out whether or not some cryptography is “good” enough to use for protecting secrets is a very big problem. Unfortunately there isn’t a commonly…

How solving some of the Millennium Prize Problems may threaten traditional cryptography and information security — The Millennium Prize Problems are a series of mathematical questions that represent hard boundaries in our understanding of mathematics. Answering these questions would rapidly advance our understanding of math — and empower fields like physics, biology, and chemistry accordingly with new tools to describe reality and our universe.

Judging cryptography with Kerkhoff’s Principle — and what that means for security and open source — We have a lot of standards in security. Regulations like GDPR, COPPA, PCI-DSS, and HIPAA are so common that they make their way into the plots of TV shows and movies. …

Figuring out what’s next in infrastructure computing after containers and serverless Ten years ago deploying a development environment sucked. Heroku and AWS were in their infancy, relegated to that special set of developer tools best left to people with beards who listened to Interpol and only drank pour-over coffee. Most…

A no buzzword guide to blockchains — and why most engineers in distributed computing are unimpressed — There’s a scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where the Knights of the Round Table stand marveling at the mythical castle of Camelot. “Look my liege,” one of his knights proclaims. The group begins to cry out in wonder: “Camelot! Camelot! Camelot!” Then from the back, their…