david wong

Hey! I'm David, a security engineer at the Blockchain team of Facebook, previously a security consultant for the Cryptography Services of NCC Group. This is my blog about cryptography and security and other related topics that I find interesting.

Elliptic Curves posted October 2014

I feel like I don't write much about my formation, and that it could be useful to people who are wondering about studying Cryptography at Bordeaux University.

There is a good article from a M1 student here: http://journaldumaster.stats.yt/master-csi-presentation/

And as it says there, the master 1 is do-able both for maths and CS people as long as you're willing to catch up in the other subject. There's a lot of theory that will allow you to study more interesting subjects in the second year of Master.

I've talked about some of the subjects but one subject I forgot to talk about was a M1 class: Elliptic Curves, taught by Fabien Pazuki and if you have the chance of taking a class from the guy just do it. He's one of the best math teacher I have had in my life, along with Vincent Borrelli (Surfaces & Curves at Lyon 1) and some dude I can't remember the name of. Each one of them were both really passionate and making true efforts to be pedagogical.

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Hack of the Day: How do I run untrusted shell code? posted October 2014

I've run into a nice series of video called "hack of the day" from Vivek-Ramachandran.

In this first video he explains two techniques :

  • jump-call-pop
  • xor decoding

I also got nice tips like the examining string function in gdb : x/s $ebx or the folder usr/include/asm that contains plenty of information about assembly.

The full playlist can be found on securitytube.net

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POODLE: new attack on SSL posted October 2014

A new attack on SSL 3.0 has been discovered. It's relevant because most browsers (except for Opera) allow a downgrade to SSL 3.0 if it cannot seem to use newer versions. Of course an attacker could disturb the connection and force someone to use SSL 3.0 in order to use the POODLE attack.

Full and clear explanation here

You might want a reminder of what is CBC to read it:

CBC

tl;dr: attack happens because of the way padding works in CBC in SSL 3.0

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Erasmus & Korean posted October 2014

A new year starting means new erasmus coming. And this year I've done things a bit differently, instead of just meeting the newcomers I've joined the Erasmus association of Bordeaux "Inter'action Bordeaux" and I've helped them organized many events. Parties of course but also some really cool stuff like:

  • A welcome erasmus week-end in a camping next to the Sanguinet lake (and for the first time of my life I slept on the beach! Not really comfy).

sanguinet lake erasmus week end interaction bordeaux

sanguinet lake erasmus week end interaction bordeaux

  • The Feria of Bordeaux, and no worries, no animals were injured, it was more like a silly cow running around people :)

feria bordeaux

feria victoire

Aside from participating in this new adventure, I've also started taking Korean classes at the same place where I was taking russian classes last year. And I already learned how to write/read korean. It's actually not that hard at all and if you have a few hours to spare you could learn it too :)

korean

I forgot that I also spent quite some time learning Romanian on Memrise this summer and I fell in love with Memrise again. I was actually the first of many romanian classes rankings for many weeks.

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Here we go again posted September 2014

So here's to a new school year in Bordeaux. My initial plan was to do my first year in Bordeaux and do my second year in Rennes. I liked Bordeaux so much that I decided to stay here instead, for better or worse.

First, I found a new place. It's way better than my last place (which was really, really bad). And I couldn't have asked for a better location. I'm right in the middle of everything. Bordeaux is small enough that I basically have to walk less than 5 minutes to go to restaurants, shops, supermarkets, the laundry, my friends, etc... Life is easy :)

my place

A few weeks ago an article has been written about my website 3pages in Telerama (a nationwide paper). It's small but that's something :)

telerama

Also I started classes last week. But I'll make another post about that!

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Slim posted August 2014

I talked about Slim the other day. I wanted to do a similar project not so long ago that I would have called weblang.

I first thought about an indented language with no symbols to declare html elements. Something like that:

p
  a 'more info' href: 'http://www.google.com'
ul
  li
    hey !

But then I thought, how will I distinguish markups from text. If I want to write ul without it being translated to <ul></ul>, how do I do that?
And if I want to write several lines of text, will I have to indent them all the time ?

That's why I quickly thought the language would need brackets and a symbol to distinguish markup from plain text (I used $).

Slim is somehow what I had imagined at the beginning and it's working!

The above example in Slim would be written as such:

p
  a href="http://www.google.com" more info
ul
  li
    | hey !

Not so far from what I had in mind :)

If you're not convinced yet, try this html to Slim conversion app on a heavy html page of yours that you can't really understand anymore and you'll see how amazing it is!

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Unit Tests in Rails posted August 2014

I've heard about unit test. They seems to be extremely important for a crypto application, but for a web app? Do I really need them?

mimoo: Hey I'm beginning with Rails, should I worry about unit test yet?
eladmeidar: tests are always important, in fact, it's more important than anything else
mimoo: it seems so boring though
fowlduck: don't bother with tests if you don't want to
fowlduck: remember to be conscious of frustration in pain while you develop, though, and try to figure out ways to avoid it later
fowlduck: you will almost certainly eventually feel frustration due to lack of tests
fowlduck: but wait until you feel it, if you want to
fowlduck: it's a good pain to feel. you don't quickly forget it
fowlduck: I like grapes
eladmeidar: i like grapes too

(extracts from #RubyOnRails on freenode)

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Some Rails' magic. posted August 2014

If you use Rails you know that Rails also has some pretty weird routes for default.

routes

And if you're like me you're wondering how is the browser understanding those requests. The requests are correct, and should be used but nowadays browsers only understand GET and POST queries. That's why they are often not used correctly and have lost a lot of meaning in web development.

So first, here's how Rails is doing it, by including jQuery_ujs, a jQuery plugin specially made for Rails that permits the use of those other verbs (DELETE, PUT, PATCH...).

What you write in Rails looks like that by the way.

<%= link_to 'Destroy', controller, data: {:confirm => 'Are you sure?'}, :method => :delete %>

And what it does is that it creates a link that will actually send a hidden form using POST with an input telling Rails it's actually a DELETE.

It's a hack. But it feels nice.

PS: And that's not all, jQuery_ujs does other useful things.

Rails is not a Ruby framework. It's a ruby+javascript+css framework.

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Ruby on Rails posted August 2014

I just pulled an all nighter on Rails. I like it. I really really like it.

I like Ruby. I like how everything makes sense. I like how things are pretty and I like how everything was setup for the perfect web developing experience.

Before that I used Django, and I didn't like it. Oh sure I didn't use it enough to have a real opinion on it. But my first impression was bad. The way it handled the static files, the namespaces ( /templates/blog/blog/ ), the way everything seemed to be made up and counter-intuitive. I didn't like it because it felt limited and forced, almost unnatural.

And well before that I used CodeIgniter, which I really like because it's dead simple and it leaves you a huge amount of liberties. This blog is made in CodeIgniter by the way.

But back to Rails. Here's what I like:

  • There is a convention. And it feels nice to be guided for once. There is a way to do things and you feel like you are coding correctly when you respect them. For example a controller should be a plural noun in CamelCase, like "Bears", and its respective model should be the singular noun, in this case "Bear". Database tables have to use the snake_case. And on and on.

  • There is beauty in ruby. The unless, the ?, the symbols, the syntax, the blocks, the... I like it. It looks beautiful and feels good to write.

  • Everything is already prepared for you. There is CoffeeScript, Sass, jQuery, jQuery-ujs, turbo-link, ... and There is so much that is just waiting to be served. A gem away.

I feel dumb for having waited so long to take the leap. I heard of Rails years ago but couldn't see the point. I remember thinking Ruby was weird. Boy... Things are gonna get so much easier when I'll have a good understanding of this beast!

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Where have I been? posted August 2014

I've been on holidays, not doing much, mostly enjoying what is sadly my very last summer holiday sheds a tear.

But as usual, when I'm not productive I get all grumpy and I feel like I'm losing precious time.

Before holidays: "I'll have plenty of time to learn and code!"
During holidays: "Man I'm just gonna watch another episode of this new tv show"

So these past few weeks I chose to put android, google glass, unity and oculus asides. I'll deal with them later.

Now It's time to learn. And you can't create without learning the technologies first!

So the first thing I did was take a look at React and MongoDB. After spending a few hours with React I knew I didn't need it and fell in love with Angular. MongoDB seems pretty cool and it's my first time with a noSQL database (I followed the awesome Andrew Burgess tutorial on Tutsplus).

I've been reading a lot about Rails lately and I'm trying to gather all the info I need before starting my next project which will involve those technologies that I've never used before:

  • Ruby on Rails

  • Slim

  • Angular

  • CoffeeScript

I already have a simple but useful project in mind.

I start school on September the 1st and I also want to be able to spend a week with GOlang before having too many things to do what I want.

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