2023-03-01 08:01
Earlier this year, Cendyne wrote a blog post covering the use of HKDF, building partially upon my own blog post about HKDF and the KDF security definition, but moreso inspired by a cryptogra… Read More
Blog Directory > Software Blogs > Dhole Moments - Software, Security, Cryptography, and the Furry Fandom software Blog >
Dhole Moments - Software, Security, Cryptography, And The Furry Fandom Blog
soatok.blog
Blogarama's Sponsor
Tags:
twitter
security
account
furries
hashing
mastodon
encryption
social media
bytes
thisg srpconstantsg thisexpsize
Gay security expert with a fursona writes about cryptography, the furry community, computer security, society, and many other topics. It's never a dull moment at Dhole Moments.
2023-01-27 05:10
The Furry Fandom is a vibrant participatory online community. Furries skew heavily LGBTQIA+ and largely originated as a queer-positive spin-off of the science fiction fandom.
Last year… Read More
2023-01-21 07:37
Whether businesses thrive or shutter depends largely on trust. This is as true of restaurants and fursuit makers as it is of password managers and private messaging apps.
Trust is hard to… Read More
2023-01-06 07:01
I’ve had a couple people ask me if I would do a yearly recap blog post like I did for 2021 and 2020 previously.
Unfortunately, the year opened the same way it closed: Twitter.
Tw… Read More
2022-12-29 15:44
Ever since the famous “Open Sesame” line from One Thousand and One Nights, humanity was doomed to suffer from the scourge of passwords.
Courtesy of SwiftOnSecurityEven in a wo… Read More
2022-12-21 19:11
When it comes to AES-GCM, I am not a fan. Most of my gripes fall into one of two categories:
Gripes with AES itself
Gripes with AES-GCM as a construction
However, one of my gripes tec… Read More
2022-12-16 14:02
This is going to be a bit less polished than my usual writing, because I’m hammering it out before a busy day at work.
My Twitter account was suspended last night, around the same t… Read More
2022-11-22 10:57
As Twitter’s new management continues to nosedive the platform directly into the ground, many people are migrating to what seem like drop-in alternatives; i.e. Cohost and Mastodon. Som… Read More
2022-11-07 10:06
As everyone knows, Elon Musk is now running Twitter directly into the ground. Who knows? Maybe he needed some inspiration for the Boring Company.
Art: Chai Lynx
This has, as many predic… Read More
2022-09-09 08:46
Last night, the Internet learned that Patreon fired their entire security team, abruptly.
For those asking for a primary source: https://t.co/Wja4t5QrY6Someone scoop up Emily Metcalfe (@… Read More
2022-09-06 08:07
The Furry Fandom is many things to many people, and it’s difficult to pin a single definition for it down. If you ask 10 furries to explain the furry fandom, you’re likely to end… Read More
2022-08-20 21:50
Cryptographic agility is a vaguely defined property, but is commonly understood to mean, “Able to quickly swap between cryptographic primitives in response to new attacks.”
Wi… Read More
2022-08-18 05:05
If you follow me on Twitter, you probably already knew that I attended DEFCON 30 in Las Vegas.
If you were there in person, you probably also saw this particular nerd walking around:
T… Read More
2022-07-06 07:46
The greatest risk to the security of a web application is when it either accepts user input and processes it or renders data in a comprehensible format (HTML, JSON, etc.) to the user.
For… Read More
2022-06-21 08:08
A mech fan wakes from a terrible nightmare. In her dream, she finds herself in a society where anthropomorphic robot and cyborg art is widely considered cringe by popular society, and romant… Read More
2022-06-14 22:53
I’ve worked in software security for a long time. One of my earliest blog posts cited my HackerOne profile as a data point for taking my opinion seriously, but I never really considere… Read More
2022-05-19 07:36
Earlier this year, Cendyne published A Deep Dive into Ed25519 Signatures, which covered some of the different types of digital signature algorithms, but mostly delved into the Ed25519 algori… Read More
2022-05-16 23:07
Content Warning: Mass shooting, conspiracy theory weirdos, homophobia, transphobia, and all sorts of bigotry. Basically if you have any triggers at all, definitely sit this one out.
This… Read More
2022-05-13 21:36
It’s very difficult to estimate, with any meaningful accuracy, the number of furries that exist on planet Earth. But for the moment, let’s do a rough estimate.
Estimating the… Read More
2022-04-06 10:30
You’ve probably heard the rumors by now. It’s cropped up in Michigan, Kentucky, Nebraska, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and even Australia.
The rumor is: Parents around the country… Read More
2022-03-30 12:42
If your first instinct upon reading the title of this blog post was the Ctrl+F for the words “SJW”, “woke”, or “cancel culture”, you’re already assu… Read More
2022-02-10 00:11
If you can somehow avoid using RSA (i.e. using Elliptic Curve Cryptography instead), then don’t use RSA at all. Then you can skip this blog post entirely and all is right in the world… Read More
2022-02-09 11:52
It all started with an article in the Mississippi Free Press by Nick Judin.
Ridgeland Mayor Gene McGee is withholding $110,000 of funding from the Madison County Library System allegedly… Read More
2022-01-27 11:13
Did you know that, in the Furry Fandom, the most popular choice in species for one’s fursona is actually a hybrid?
Source: FurScience
Of course, we’re not talking about tha… Read More
2022-01-12 09:00
It happened again. You were doom-scrolling on the hellsite (a.k.a. browsng Twitter) and stumbled upon some stranger’s tweet that was so stunningly ignorant that it almost seems artific… Read More
2022-01-07 19:06
Twitter Spaces are an annoying feature that you can’t turn off that consume part of your precious screen real estate on the official Twitter for Android App (and presumably the iOS app… Read More
2021-12-29 20:17
In the spirit of my 2020 recap, I thought it’d be fun to look back at everything that happened on this blog in 2021.
Controversy Strikes
The year opened with my most controversia… Read More
2021-11-17 11:46
NIST opened public comments on SP 800-108 Rev. 1 (the NIST recommendations for Key Derivation Functions) last month. The main thing that’s changed from the original document published… Read More
2021-11-10 13:16
In the grand scheme of things, I’m a nobody.
This blog is enjoyed by a few people (mostly technologists, furries, and furry technologists), but it’s not really providing a ser… Read More
2021-11-05 08:54
(If you aren’t interested in the background information, feel free to skip to the meat of this post. If you’re in a hurry, there’s a summary of results at the end.)
Arou… Read More
2021-10-19 07:00
Cryptocurrency grifts come in many shapes and sizes.
You have the “Elon Musk giveaway” scams from hacked Twitter accounts. You have people who lurk on trading platforms (e.g… Read More
2021-10-01 04:26
In A Furry’s Guide to Cryptocurrency, I briefly mentioned that NFTs are a dumb idea and not a valid reason for anyone–but especially furries–to get involved with cryptocurr… Read More
2021-09-28 11:41
Earlier this year I discussed some noteworthy examples of crackpot cryptography and snake-oil security on this blog.
In this post, I’m going to analyze the claims made by CEW System… Read More
2021-08-24 14:41
Programmers don’t understand hash functions, and I can demonstrate this to most of the people that will read this with a single observation:
When you saw the words “hash func… Read More
2021-08-20 15:07
Just to assuage any panic, let me state this up front.
If you’re reading this blog post wondering if your Lobste.rs account is at risk, good news: I didn’t publish it until af… Read More
2021-08-17 11:02
TL;DR: Don’t stop using the app. It’s not unsafe enough to warrant jettisoning entirely, and the pandemic is a much, much higher concern.
Safer Illinois is, according to their… Read More
2021-08-16 17:00
Last year I wrote a grab-bag post titled, Don’t Forget To Brush Your Fur, because I’m terrible at SEO or making content easily discoverable.
In the same vein as that previous… Read More
2021-08-09 13:55
“You’re going to love this, trust me. What you’re seeing now is my normal state. This is a super-spreader. And this… This is what is known as a super-spreader that h… Read More
2021-07-30 09:07
Canonicalization Attacks occur when a protocol that feeds data into a hash function used in a MAC or Digital Signature calculation fails to ensure some property that’s expected of the… Read More
2021-07-13 22:36
Over the weekend, I decided to make an account on Furry Amino. My reasoning at the time was, “A lot of furries lurk there, I should see what it’s about.”
That was a bad… Read More
2021-07-09 00:58
The Collatz conjecture is an allegedly-unsolved problem in mathematics.
I say allegedly there because, reading those words, I feel like mathematicians are going to jump out from my closet… Read More
2021-07-02 06:32
Last week, Floridians were startled by an emergency alert sent to all of our cell phones. Typically when this sort of alert happens, it’s an Amber Alert, which means a child was abduct… Read More
2021-06-22 07:06
A question I often get–especially from cryptography experts:
What is it with furries and Telegram?
furry group chat pamphlet pic.twitter.com/j5McTTzGuY— Tay (@Monochromemu… Read More
2021-06-11 23:00
Earlier today, I made a Twitter shitpost that confused a lot of folks from the UK.
AES-GCM-SIV be likeYou can have little a nonce reuse, as a treat— [email protected]~# (@SoatokD… Read More
2021-06-07 19:44
Previously on Dead Ends in Cryptanalysis, we talked about length-extension attacks and precisely why modern hash functions like SHA-3 and BLAKE2 aren’t susceptible.
The art and scie… Read More
2021-06-03 02:40
There are a lot of excellent computer hackers in the world, and many of them are also furries.
However, there are a lot more furries than excellent computer hackers in the world, so you w… Read More
2021-05-19 09:22
Allen Gwinn is a Professor of Practice at the Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business. In a recent article published by The Hill, Allen Gwinn shared his bad opinions abo… Read More
2021-05-18 11:51
Before I get into this story, I feel it’s important that you know where I’m coming from. But if you don’t care about that, feel free to skip the Background section.
Back… Read More
2021-05-11 10:21
The Dhole Conservation Fund decided to make the 28th of May this year the first annual World Dhole Day (because it’s normally Whistling Day, and dholes are whistling dogs).
Image pr… Read More
2021-05-10 20:09
Comedian John Oliver has been hosting a weekly show on HBO called Last Week Tonight for a few years now. Most of each episode is also freely available on YouTube.
In a recent episode, Joh… Read More
2021-04-21 13:58
One of the funniest concepts for a YouTube channel has to be TierZoo, which treats the animal kingdom as an MMORPG and animal species as different classes within this hypothetical game, and… Read More
2021-04-19 10:21
Normally when you see an article that talks about cryptocurrency come across your timeline, you can safely sort it squarely into two camps: For and Against. If you’re like me, you migh… Read More
2021-04-02 11:30
If you’ve somehow never encountered an Internet meme before, you may be surprised to learn that the number 69 is often associated with sex (and, more specifically, a particular sex act… Read More
2021-03-27 19:51
I’m not going to mince words on this one.
No, it’s not just you. No, it’s not your fault. No, nobody knows what to do about it.
Recently, a lot of furry artists and c… Read More
2021-03-12 09:47
Most of the data encrypted on the Internet these days uses an AEAD mode, which consists of a stream cipher (which may be built out of a hash function or a block cipher) and a polynomial auth… Read More
2021-03-05 04:54
I get a lot of emails from job recruiters that, even to this day, I’m not qualified for. They often ask for ridiculous requirements, like a Master’s Degree or Ph.D in Computer Sc… Read More
2021-02-24 22:26
Cryptographers and cryptography engineers love to talk about the latest attacks and how to mitigate them. LadderLeak breaks ECDSA with less than 1 bit of nonce leakage? Raccoon attack brings… Read More
2021-02-11 14:12
Let me say up front, I’m no stranger to negative or ridiculous feedback. It’s incredibly hard to hurt my feelings, especially if you intend to. You don’t openly participate… Read More
2021-02-09 10:38
A few years ago, when the IETF’s Crypto Forum Research Group was deeply entrenched in debates about elliptic curves for security (which eventually culminated in RFC 7748 and RFC 8032)… Read More
2021-01-27 07:30
Earlier this week, Twitter announced an initiative to combat misinformation on their platform that they call Birdwatch.
How Birdwatch works: Volunteers sign up (assuming they meet all the… Read More
2021-01-26 04:32
The year 2021 has taught us, if nothing else, that we can be sure that lies, misinformation, and bullshit are post-scarce resources in modern society.
In such an information economy, it s… Read More
2021-01-21 04:56
Let me state up front that, while we’re going to be talking about an open source project that was recently submitted to Hacker News’s “Show HN” section, the intent of… Read More
2021-01-14 11:21
Whether you’re curious about the furry community or already decided to participate, allow me to extend you a warm welcome to the furry fandom.
Since you’re probably new, her… Read More
2021-01-11 07:29
If you’re like most people, you don’t have strong opinions about the internal structures of block ciphers. You’re likely perfectly happy using something standard in a stand… Read More
2021-01-09 12:59
In 2015, a subreddit called /r/The_Donald was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and widely been regarded as a bad move.
Roughly 5 years after its inception, the Reddit sta… Read More
2020-12-24 07:53
I started this blog in April 2020 after a brief and irregular stint as a writer on Medium, because while I like putting my thoughts on a screen, I really disliked how Medium’s website… Read More
2020-12-24 06:16
As we look upon the sunset of a remarkably tiresome year, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about cryptographic wear-out.
What is cryptographic wear-out?
It’s the thresho… Read More
2020-12-12 00:05
Earlier tonight, someone decided to change their Twitter handle and display name to impersonate a furry and solicit money to the scammer’s PayPal account.
DO NOT SEND MONEY TO THIS… Read More
2020-12-04 04:05
Vega of Opinionated Guides (OpGuides for short) recently asked to interview me for their website hosted on Github Pages. You can read the interview here if that strikes your fancy.
Opinio… Read More
2020-11-27 11:09
Imagine you’re a software developer, and you need to authenticate users based on a username and password.
If you’re well-read on the industry standard best practices, you&rsqu&hell…Read More
2020-11-19 04:02
The OpenSSH team recently announced the removal of support for ssh-rsa keys in OpenSSH. This announcement was met with a modest and well-deserved fanfare from cryptographers, because RSA suc… Read More
2020-11-14 07:16
Governments are back on their anti-encryption bullshit again.
Between the U.S. Senate’s “EARN IT” Act, the E.U.’s slew of anti-encryption proposals, and Australia… Read More
2020-11-12 06:18
Earlier this year, I detailed a simple technique for deanonymizing scam sites on CloudFlare, by getting the back-end webserver to email you and reveal the server’s IP address (so you c… Read More
2020-11-11 05:28
We’ve more-or-less all been coping with the pandemic since early March.
During this time, I’ve seen a lot of people stressed and depressed to their breaking points, usually wh… Read More
2020-11-04 16:17
Earlier this week, security researcher Ryan Castellucci published a blog post with a somewhat provocative title: DKIM: Show Your Privates.
After reading the ensuing discussions on Hacker… Read More
2020-10-28 15:44
Zoom recently announced that they were going to make end-to-end encryption available to all of their users–not just customers.
Our new end-to-end encryption (E2EE) feature is now a… Read More
2020-10-23 10:59
The cryptography and information security experts who read my blog probably wonder from time to time, “Why furries though?” which I’ve spent ample time answering and hopefu… Read More
2020-10-22 14:13
If living through the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything–and it surely hasn’t–it would be the importance of friendship and community to our physical and emotional wel… Read More
2020-10-16 13:20
A frequent source of confusion in the furry fandom is about commission pricing for furry art.
This confusion is often driven by (usually younger) furries demanding free or severely cheap… Read More
2020-10-13 12:18
I dislike politics in general.
That doesn’t mean I don’t write about it when it’s relevant, but I’m always less happy with any of my writing that touches on these… Read More
2020-10-09 03:50
Tonight on InfoSec Twitter, this gem was making the rounds:
Hello cybersecurity and election security people, I sometimes embed your tweets in the Cybersecurity 202 newsletter. Some of y… Read More
2020-10-07 02:46
This is the first entry in a (potentially infinite) series of dead end roads in the field of cryptanalysis.
Cryptography engineering is one of many specialties within the wider field of s… Read More
2020-09-28 08:48
Serious question: Why doesn’t the Furry Fandom have more comedians?
Art by Khia.
I don’t mean racist loudmouth assholes who wouldn’t know a good joke if it cup-checke… Read More
2020-09-15 10:02
There’s an old adage on the Internet: “Don’t feed the trolls.”
The reasoning for such an argument is kind of a proof by induction if you squint hard enough at its… Read More
2020-09-12 06:01
Spyware written for educational institutions to flex their muscles of control over students and their families when learning from their home computer is still, categorically, spyware.
Dep… Read More
2020-09-09 13:38
Since the IETF’s CFRG decided to recommend OPAQUE as a next-generation Password Authenticated Key Exchange, there has been a lot of buzz in the cryptography community about committing… Read More
2020-08-27 11:57
If you’re ever tasked with implementing a cryptography feature–whether a high-level protocol or a low-level primitive–you will have to take special care to ensure you&rsquo&hell…Read More
2020-08-24 09:36
Being a furry is like: Every once in a while, you’ll stumble across an enormous contingent of the furry fandom that you were entirely unaware of for years.
Sure, you’d expect… Read More
2020-08-21 13:34
As American students are preparing to return to the classroom during a pandemic–in flagrant disregard of everything ranging from our scientific understanding to matters of good taste&n&hell…Read More
2020-08-10 07:00
Some of you may be surprised to learn that my fursona is not a fox, nor a wolf; nor is it a fictitious fox-wolf hybrid popular within the furry fandom (which is usually called a “folf… Read More
2020-07-24 17:55
Earlier this week, NIST announced Round 3 of the Post-Quantum Cryptography project and published their rationale for selecting from the Round 2 candidates.
NIST did something clever this… Read More
2020-07-22 09:36
This is a bit different from my usual blog post, insofar as I don’t have much of a point except that I’m tired of repeating myself.
The other day, I was frustrated about Pinte… Read More
2020-07-21 06:48
I recently needed to find an image that I didn’t have saved on my computer in order to share with a group chat. For laughs. Naturally, I did the first thing most of us do when that hap… Read More
2020-07-15 08:05
Historical Context of Iota’s Hash Functions
Once upon a time, researchers discovered that the hash function used within the Iota cryptocurrency (Curl-P), was vulnerable to practical… Read More
2020-07-12 21:33
There seems to be a lot of interest among software developers in the various cryptographic building blocks (block ciphers, hash functions, etc.), and more specifically how they stack up agai… Read More
2020-07-09 09:28
Sometimes my blog posts end up on social link-sharing websites with a technology focus, such as Lobste.rs or Hacker News.
On a good day, this presents an opportunity to share one’s… Read More
2020-07-08 17:59
If you see the letters GNU in a systems design, and that system intersects with cryptography, I can almost guarantee that it will be badly designed to an alarming degree.
This is as true… Read More
2020-07-07 14:05
There are a lot of random topics I’ve wanted to write about since I started Dhole Moments, and for one reason or another, haven’t actually written about. I know from past experie… Read More
2020-07-06 13:00
Rhyner has published a guide to chatting with furries and overcoming one’s anxiety and self-doubt. If you have a hard time starting up a conversation with furries, you’ll certain… Read More
2020-07-02 21:22
As America prepares for record-breaking infection statistics on a daily basis, many of us are looking at other countries safely reopening and wondering, “Why can’t we have nice t… Read More
Subscribe to Dhole Moments - Software, Security, Cryptography, And The Furry Fandom
Get updates delivered right to your inbox!