David Wong

cryptologie.net

cryptography, security, and random thoughts

Hey! I'm David, cofounder of zkSecurity, research advisor at Archetype, and author of the Real-World Cryptography book. I was previously a cryptography architect of Mina at O(1) Labs, the security lead for Libra/Diem at Facebook, and a security engineer at the Cryptography Services of NCC Group. Welcome to my blog about cryptography, security, and other related topics.

← back to all posts

Links from the past weeks

blog

I’ve been posting some more links to the links section:

Daniel J. Bernstein: “How to manipulate standards”

DJB being DJB

djbcrypto djbjesus

Downloading Software Safely Is Nearly Impossible

The funny tale of a dude who wants to safely ssh to his server on his brand new windows laptop. This follows by how to safely download, execute and use PuttY… and it’s hilarious.

About Public Key Pinning

Cloudflare explains Logjam

logjam

An awesome article written by Filippo that complements mine quite well. I don’t know who made this logo but it rocks!

Recent Hacks

A timeline of famous hacks, leaks, etc… If you are curious

Cooperative Strategy

A whitehouse blogpost by Ed Felten on cooperative strategy, a nice counter-intuitive puzzle that I will not forget!

Alice and Bob are playing a game. They are teammates, so they will win or lose together. Before the game starts, they can talk to each other and agree on a strategy.
When the game starts, Alice and Bob go into separate soundproof rooms – they cannot communicate with each other in any way. They each flip a coin and note whether it came up Heads or Tails. (No funny business allowed – it has to be an honest coin flip and they have to tell the truth later about how it came out.) Now Alice writes down a guess as to the result of Bob’s coin flip; and Bob likewise writes down a guess as to Alice’s flip.
If either or both of the written-down guesses turns out to be correct, then Alice and Bob both win as a team. But if both written-down guesses are wrong, then they both lose.

Cryptography in Wolfram

Okay that one seems kind of useless. But if someone wants to tell me otherwise I’m all ears! But this seems more like a stunt to introduce their new cloud service:

One of the main motivations for adding cryptographic functionality to the Wolfram Language was the arrival of the Wolfram Cloud.

Adios Hola!

If you haven’t heard, some people from (or not) Lulzsec have found some serious vulns on the Hola! Plugin. And also they are not happy. Personally I find this Hola! really useful as a free solution to get a netflix US account when not in the US and being able to watch youtube (because everything is “blocked in your country” when you are not in the US). And the fact that you are basically a TOR node is also nice, it increases global anonymity! But that’s just my opinion.

Elliptic Curve Playground

Play with elliptic curves!

MOAR?

You can find more on the links section. You can also suggest me links there =)

suggested reads:
← back to all posts blog • 2015-06-03
currently reading:
Links from the past weeks
06-03 blog
📖 my book
Real-World Cryptography is available from Manning Publications.
A practical guide to applied cryptography for developers and security professionals.
🎙️ my podcast
Two And A Half Coins on Spotify.
Discussing cryptocurrencies, databases, banking, and distributed systems.
📺 my youtube
Cryptography videos on YouTube.
Video explanations of cryptographic concepts and security topics.