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Against XMPP+OMEMO
XMPP is a messaging protocol (among other things) that needs no introduction to any technical audience. Its various implementations have proliferated through technical communities for decades. Many...
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Security Issues in Matrix’s Olm Library
I don’t consider myself exceptional in any regard, but I stumbled upon a few cryptography vulnerabilities in Matrix’s Olm library with so little effort that it was nearly accidental. It should not be...
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Federated Key Transparency Project Update
Earlier this year, I wrote about planned effort to design a federated Key Transparency proposal. The end goal for this work was constrained to building end-to-end encryption into a new type of Direct...
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Introducing Alacrity to Federated Cryptography
There are two mental models for designing a cryptosystem that offers end-to-end encryption to all of its users. The first is the Signal model. Predicated on Moxie’s notion that the ecosystem is...
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Doesn’t Matter
I need everyone to understand something: This doesn’t matter. Dhole Moments is not the official outlet of anything that will affect you or your daily life. It carries no financial weight or political...
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Invisible Salamanders Are Not What You Think
Ever since the Invisible Salamanders paper was published, there has been a quiet renaissance within my friends and colleagues in applied cryptography for studying systems that use Authenticated...
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E2EE for the Fediverse Update – We’re Going Post-Quantum
In 2022, I wrote about my plan to build end-to-end encryption for the Fediverse. The goals were simple: Provide secure encryption of message content and media attachments between Fediverse users, as a...
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The Continued Trajectory of Idiocy in the Tech Industry
Every hype cycle in the technology industry continues a steady march towards a shitty future that nobody wants. CMYKat Note: I know this isn’t unique to the tech industry, but I can’t write about...
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Cryptographic Innuendos
Neil Madden recently wrote a blog post titled, Digital Signatures and How to Avoid Them. One of the major points he raised is: Another way that signatures cause issues is that they are too powerful...
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Why are furry conventions offering HIV testing to attendees?
Spoiler: It’s nothing scandalous or bad. Every once in a while, someone posts this photo on Twitter to attempt to dunk on furries: Midwest FurFest 2018 Over the years, I’ve seen this discourse play...
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Ambition, The Fediverse, and Technology Freedom
If you’re new to reading this blog, you might not already be aware of my efforts to develop end-to-end encryption for ActivityPub-based software. It’s worth being aware of before you continue to read...
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What To Use Instead of PGP
It’s been more than five years since The PGP Problem was published, and I still hear from people who believe that using PGP (whether GnuPG or another OpenPGP implementation) is a thing they should be...
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Some Thoughts on the Twitter Mass Exodus
Another wave of Twitter users are jettisoning the social media website in favor of alternatives. Some are landing in the Fediverse (Mastodon and other ActivityPub-enabled software). Others are going...
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Key Transparency and the Right to be Forgotten
This post is the first in a new series covering some of the reasoning behind decisions made in my project to build end-to-end encryption for direct messages on the Fediverse. (Collectively,...
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Beyond Bcrypt
In 2010, Coda Hale wrote How To Safely Store A Password which began with the repeated phrase, “Use bcrypt”, where the word bcrypt was linked to a different implementation for various programming...
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Imagining Private Airspaces for Bluesky
Recently, I shared my thoughts on the Twitter Exodus. The short of that post is: Even though I’m quite happy on the Fediverse, I think the best outcome is for Bluesky to “win” the popularity contest...
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Furry, Queer, and Lonely
What is it about being queer that makes loneliness, isolation, and rejection so much more intense than enduring than what our straight friends and family purport to experience? Harubaki Are we just...
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Ideas and Execution
I’ve been known to blog about ideas that I don’t have the time or energy to build myself–from using asynchronous ratcheting trees to support multicast networking in WireGuard (and other Noise-based...
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The Better Daemons Of Our Profession
I’ve spent the better part of 2023 and 2024 trying to imagine the specific changes we technology nerds could make to improve things somewhat. Meme remix of Matt Bors’s comic and Stan Kelly’s Sickos...
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Roasted Christmas Spam from Muhu.ai
I wrote what I thought would be the final blog post of 2024 last week, and was looking forward to starting 2025 strong with a blog I’d been drafting since July 2023. But then, a little after Midnight...
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