Everything PKI Oct. 14, 2019, 5:10 p.m.

PKI is really powerful, and really interesting. The math is complicated, and the standards are stupidly baroque, but the core concepts are actually quite simple. Certificates are the best way to identify code and devices, and identity is super useful for security, monitoring, metrics, and a million other things. Using certificates is not that hard. No harder than learning a new language or database. It’s just slightly annoying and poorly documented. This is the missing manual.

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Elliptic Curve Cryptography Explained Oct. 9, 2019, 8:49 a.m.

Recently, I am learning how Elliptic Curve Cryptography works. I searched around the internet, found so many articles and videos explaining it. Most of them are covering only a portion of it, some of them skip many critical steps how you get from here to there. In the end, I didn’t find an article that really explains it from end-to-end in an intuitive way. With that in mind, I would like to write a post explaining Elliptic Curve Cryptography, cover from the basics to key exchange, encryption, and decryption.

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Elliptic Curve Cryptography for Beginners Oct. 16, 2017, 9:43 a.m.

A description of ECC without using advanced math

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Network Protocols – Programmer's Compendium June 13, 2017, 9:55 a.m.

The network stack does several seemingly-impossible things. It does reliable transmission over our unreliable networks, usually without any detectable hiccups. It adapts smoothly to network congestion. It provides addressing to billions of active nodes. It routes packets around damaged network infrastructure, reassembling them in the correct order on the other side even if they arrived out of order. It accommodates esoteric analog hardware needs, like balancing the charge on the two ends of an Ethernet cable. This all works so well that users never hear of it, and even most programmers don't know how it works.

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The Document Which Was Formerly Called The MIT Guide to Lockpicking March 28, 2017, 5:27 p.m.

The theory of lock picking is the theory of exploiting mechanical defects. There are a few basic concepts and definitions but the bulk of the material consists of tricks for opening locks with particular defects or characteristics.

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iOS 10: The MacStories Review Sept. 14, 2016, 6:26 p.m.

Sometimes, change is unexpected. More often than not, change sneaks in until it feels grand and inevitable. Gradually, and then suddenly. iOS users have lived through numerous tides of such changes over the past three years.

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