nmadden

6 ms·

1.
by nmadden 7d ago
Signing things by default has repeatedly been found to have serious unintended consequences. Do you really want your leaked/stolen photos to be undeniably linked to you? https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2020&#x2
2.
by nmadden 11d ago
Speculation, but Edge was John Brockman’s thing and he was heavily connected to Epstein, so probably has become a bit toxic for potential contributors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brockman_(literary_agent)...
3.
by nmadden 12d ago
Sort of, but not really. OAuth isn’t RBAC and the Dropbox chooser isn’t FGA in the sense of that article. My book (linked from my profile) covers the distinctions in more detail in chapters 7, 8 and 9.
4.
by nmadden 14d ago
I used to use the example of Dropbox’s chooser API to illustrate this: https://www.dropbox.com/developers/chooser If you use this API (via a simple widget library) then the user simply picks a file in their dropbox and
5.
by nmadden 4mo ago
> The pads are split into three pieces that are XORed to create the actual pad to reduce risk of compromise. Thus creating a two-time pad, which is completely insecure…
6.
by nmadden 5mo ago
Re: cheap - Anthropic’s write-up said it cost $20,000 of runs to find that bug (and a few others). So not that cheap compared to other tools - more similar in cost to human review/pentest, but probably more exhaustive. > This was t
7.
by nmadden 10mo ago
> Crashing is not an outage. Are you in the right thread?
8.
by nmadden 10mo ago
MBP = Macbook Pro AW = Apple Watch? What is APP?
9.
by nmadden 10mo ago
Not sure why you're being downvoted for recommending a classic textbook!
10.
by nmadden 10mo ago
> Because in practice, everything is finite. Indeed! https://neilmadden.blog/2019/02/24/why-you-really-can-parse-...
11.
Cryptography 101 with Alfred Menezes(cryptography101.ca)
120 points by nmadden 11mo ago|19 comments
12.
by nmadden 11mo ago
100% reproducible deterministic bugs are absolutely the easiest class of bugs.
13.
by nmadden 11mo ago
The proprietary/commercial TALA engine is really excellent too. I’ve been using it to do complex dataflow diagrams, and the results are so incredibly well laid out.
14.
by nmadden 11mo ago
I guess. But it would only impact you if you’re using cookies with curl (I assume the middleware is only applied to requests with cookies?) — and it seems pretty easy to add a -H ‘sec-fetch-site: none’ in that case.
15.
by nmadden 11mo ago
The article has a whole section about requiring those headers by forcing the use of TLS 1.3 — the theory being that browsers modern enough to support 1.3 are also modern enough to support the headers. But why not just enforce the headers?
16.
by nmadden 11mo ago
Enforcing TLS 1.3 seems like a roundabout way to enforce this. Why not simply block requests that don’t have an Origin/Sec-Fetch-Site header?
17.
by nmadden 11mo ago
Yes, of course it’s (largely) subjective. But I have actually read much of the source code of Spring. I know it _very_ well.
18.
by nmadden 11mo ago
Java is sprawling now. It wasn’t 26 years ago.
19.
by nmadden 11mo ago
Yes, in theory they are good. In practice they cause enormous amounts of pain and work for library maintainers with little benefit to them (often only downsides). So, many libraries don’t support them and they are very hard to adopt increme
20.
by nmadden 11mo ago
Do you really think that in 26 years of professional Java programming I’d have never touched Spring? I’ve been using Spring since it was first released. I’ve found CVEs in Spring ( https://spring.io/security/cve-2020-540
21.
by nmadden 1y ago
> The first day I used it, Claude got stuck in a loop trying to fix a problem using the same 2 incorrect solutions again and again and burnt through $30 of API credits before I realized things were very wrong and I stopped it. The worse
22.
by nmadden 1y ago
The improvements in programming are largely due to the adoption of “agentic” architectures. This is really a hybrid neural-symbolic approach: the symbolic part being the interpreter/compiler. Effectively the LLM still produces an almos
23.
by nmadden 1y ago
This was before LLMs. It was a combination of unit and end-to-end tests and tests written to comprehensively test every combination of parameters (eg test this security property holds for every single JWT algorithm we support etc). Also bea
24.
by nmadden 1y ago
Adding some OAuth helps a bit: https://neilmadden.blog/2022/01/20/why-the-oauth-mtls-spec-i... (I quite like the combo of app-level OAuth plus mTLS service mesh for backend comms).
25.
by nmadden 2y ago
CBOR is basically a fork of MsgPack. I prefer the original - it’s simpler and there are more high-quality implementations available.
26.
by nmadden 2y ago
Yes (although practically speaking it’s very unlikely that Grover will ever break AES-128), but that’s still a brute force attack and still subject to the physical limits mentioned in the Schneier quote. Whereas attacks on RSA like the numb
27.
by nmadden 2y ago
That’s true for AES-256. But brute force attacks are not the most efficient way to attack RSA, so it’s not true in that case. (Eg quantum computers would break RSA-4096 but not AES-256).
28.
by nmadden 2y ago
Yes, the WebAuthn spec is pretty unreadable. Every time I open it I feel like I’m lost in a maze of twisty hyperlinks, all alike.
29.
by nmadden 2y ago
Have you ever attended an all hands that couldn’t have been an email?
30.
by nmadden 2y ago
Indeed, modern ML has been a validation of (some of) GOFAI: https://neilmadden.blog/2024/06/30/machine-learning-and-the-...

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