Any cryptographers who are sad about the post-quantum competitions coming to an end and looking for a new problem, here's one I've seen in a few places:

There's a trend towards end-to-end encryption for all datacentre interconnects (no plaintext on the wire, for any wire that leaves the CPU package). This includes things like PCIe, 100 GigE, and so on. As a result, we're rapidly approaching a world where there's over 1 Tb/s of encrypted traffic flowing in and out of every node.

At this rate, bit flips are inevitable somewhere (especially when you scale this up to a datacentre size). This leads to a couple of problems. The first one is bit flips on the wire.

The integrity tags in AES will catch these, but if you need to retransmit that's very painful (the bandwidth-delay product means the buffer sizes get huge), so ideally you want to bake in some forward error correction after encryption. But now you're reducing data rates.

Problem 1:

Can you design an integrity scheme for a symmetric cypher that also provides error correction, is easy to implement in hardware, and does not provide an oracle. I honestly have no idea whether this is even theoretically possible.

Beyond that, the AES engines are hot. Encrypting at even 10 Gb/s consumes a fair bit of power (Problem 0: Can you design a symmetric cypher that can be implemented in 10% of the power of AES in a hardware implementation?). This means that bit flips can occur in the middle of the encryption. These will corrupt the data but may have valid integrity tags.

Problem 2:

Can you design a symmetric cypher such that the integrity tag calculation can be computed in a pipeline that's independent of the main encryption (without duplicating a load of work or massively increasing the number of calculations) such that a bit flip in either pipeline will cause the integrity checks to fail?

Currently, I believe the work around for this is to add forward error correction before encrypting, such that a single block failing can be small, but that also adds a lot of overhead (i.e. lower bandwidth).

Problem 3:

Can you build a cypher scheme with both of these properties? Integrity tags permit error correction and can be computed cheaply in an independent pipeline so that they can catch bit flips during encryption.

I just read this in a newsletter and thought it worth quoting and sharing. "I suggest that instead you keep your focus on all that is good in your life, and what matters most to you. I came across this quote from Maya Angelou that is perfect for this moment in our history:

My wish for you is that you continue. Continue to be who and how you are, to astonish a mean world with your acts of kindness. Continue to allow humor to lighten the burden of your tender heart."

Saw a YouTube short asking Kamala voters if they would date a Trump voter, and all the women go:

Eh, no. This is a person who has literally voted to put me at risk.

One white guy: sure! We need to tolerate that people have different opinions.

That right there.

Harm that doesn’t happen to you.
You can tolerate it because it doesn’t happen to you.

it should be even more obvious now that there are clear use cases for private, censorship-resistant ways to transfer money.

it should also be obvious that "crypto industry" grifters who are backing trump don't give two shits about that & are cozying up to fascists for profit

7️⃣ Here's the 7th installment of posts highlighting key new features of the upcoming v257 release of systemd.

The graphical login prompt you see when your computer boots up is a sensitive UI: typically, when starting to work, without much thinking you'll type in your username and password, expecting it to log you in and provide you with your desktop session. However, what if someone just opened a website in a browser in full screen mode with contents that just *looks* like your login screen, …

Steam founder Gabe Newell has $1bn worth of yachts all around the world.

Steam doesn’t get nearly enough shit from gamers btw. It is DRM lock in, they make $10bn with about 200 employees and shut everyone out of the PC market.

luxurylaunches.com/transport/g…

Not a Saudi prince or an oligarch, but it is American video game billionaire Gabe Newell that has an armada of luxury yachts worth around $1 billion. Take a look at his 6 vessels that range from an research vessel, a 365 feet long luxury yacht and even a

^{Neha Tandon Sharma (Luxurylaunches)}

New blog post! 📝

"My anti-overlay client letter" — I'm often asked about accessibility overlays, and this is the email I send to clients when that discussion gets serious.

It may be helpful to others making the case against overlays and laying down the facts.

alistairshepherd.uk/writing/ac…

#webdev #accessibility

My anti-overlay client letter - Alistair Shepherd

I really dislike accessibility overlays and am often asked about my thoughts or to implement one. This is my email response when that discussion gets serious.

^{Alistair Shepherd}