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Posts by Thomas Ptacek

Vulnerability Research Is Cooked

I wrote something: sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/03...

4 days ago 89 39 7 7
Cryptographer Matt Green as God Emperor Leto II

Cryptographer Matt Green as God Emperor Leto II

1 week ago 11 1 2 0
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AI Finds Vulns You Can Returning champion Nicholas Carlini comes back to talk about using Claude for vulnerability research, and the current vulnpocalypse. It’s all very high-brow ...

Yeah, so, I'm going to have more to say about this later, but, for now... yeah.

securitycryptographywhatever.com/2026/03/25/a...

1 week ago 13 5 2 0

I'm particularly proud of that graf. I lived in Evanston earlier in my life, and have been in Oak Park for 20 years. Anybody in Evanston who wants to compare notes with us, I promise, we won't sabotage your efforts to legalize housing just so we can get their first. But we will get there first.

1 week ago 8 0 0 0

Extremely psyched about two upcoming SCW guests, one of them this week. We've got very crunch vulnerability research and cryptography stuff coming.

2 weeks ago 23 3 0 0
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Y'all, I've seen some shit, but I've never seen someone want *both* DNSSEC ceremonies *and* the CA/B Forum before.

3 weeks ago 14 0 3 0

Ozamataz Buckshank. Stanford University.

4 weeks ago 0 0 0 0
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("Current LLMs are better vulnerability researchers than I am.")

4 weeks ago 4 0 0 0
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Nicholas Carlini at [un]prompted. If you know Carlini, you know this is a startling claim.

4 weeks ago 33 3 1 2

None of you are giving me enough credit for not participating on the TLS working group mailing list. You're welcome. Everything I don't do, I don't do it for you.

1 month ago 26 2 2 0

Annals of things people have actually written down for other people to read: "No one trusts NIST. But people do trust the IETF."

1 month ago 4 0 0 0

People who hope to apply Daniel Bernstein's rules-lawyering tactics at IETF, which were honed in the DNS WGs (where he was probably in the right), would do well to remember that those tactics have consistently failed. They've merely won him standing to complain about the IETF.

1 month ago 3 0 0 0

All this debate about whether MLKEM breaks formal methods results on the TLS protocol, when the answer all along was simply to deploy Additive Cryptography.

1 month ago 4 0 1 0
Additive Cryptography for TLS This document defines Additive Cryptography for TLS, a transition framework in which algorithms are never replaced and only accreted. Implementations MUST NOT negotiate a single key exchange algorithm...

There's only one correct way forward for handling the introduction of MLKEM into TLS, and, indeed, all future tls-wg cryptography debates, and it's this proposal:

snkth.com/add-crypto/

1 month ago 19 2 1 0

Given how i am only

a) a beneficiary of air travel (thanks for all the miles so far)
b) A non-avionics-expert reader of the EUROCAE WG-128 RTCA/DO-254 drafts
c) A spectator usually attending this type of debate with popcorn

I hope my comments are useful...

1 month ago 4 0 0 0
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"Auchentoshan" is inarguably the best distillery name.

1 month ago 4 1 0 0

Stop making videos you don't love sharing. Jesus.

1 month ago 0 0 0 0
Semantle Crab

ok so this is obviously very old news and also nobody is ever going to solve it better than this:

web.archive.org/web/20220421...

1 month ago 2 0 0 0
Word2Vec Explorer

Here's a trivial one-word-at-a-time implementation of the same rough idea (I'm not using their algorithm, it'll take you more guesses than it takes them, but you'll still get them in like <10 guesses).

semvec3-jpn.sprites.app

1 month ago 1 0 1 0
A Solver for Semantle

Very fun: if you have the dictionary of embeddings Semantle uses, solving it is a trivial linear algebra problem: they're giving you the cosine similarity back on every guess, so you can filter out most of the vocabulary on a single guess.

victoriaritvo.com/blog/semantl...

1 month ago 11 0 1 0

Chapoly authenticates the ciphertext whose keys you establish with 25519, but authenticating the key exchange is a separate problem. In the messaging setting, this is what 3DH is about in Signal Protocol.

1 month ago 3 0 1 0

It's mostly just me making dumb noises at clips from a (great) paper, so I don't think people are missing all that much.

1 month ago 0 0 1 0

No, you have the same problem with 25519! You still have to authenticate the keys.

1 month ago 1 0 1 0

Sort of. Moxie Marlinspike once wrote a blog called "the cryptographic doom principle" that went viral so everybody knows you have to encrypt your CBC ciphertext, but no commercial entity appears ever to have realized they needed to do that with RSA ciphertexts as well.

1 month ago 4 0 1 0

For a lot of years I was in the habit of criticizing cryptography designs that used asymmetric constructions because RSA is much more complicated and hard to get right than symmetric crypto. But the real problem is that it's against the law to authenticate an RSA key.

1 month ago 8 1 2 0
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It was when I got to the attack labeled "Lucky 64", after this paper managed to fit Thai and Juliano's BEAST into a short predicate building-block attack, that I realized that the authors of this paper were conducting a sick game to see how many TLS attacks they could cram into a non-TLS paper.

1 month ago 15 3 1 0
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(Akon voice) STILL COUNTS!

1 month ago 6 0 1 0

Ok so my takeaway so far is that Bitwarden managed somehow to recapitulate DROWN in a simple client/server password manager app with a single vendor.

1 month ago 4 2 1 0
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Claude, tell me, what would the worst possible feature to have be if your cryptosystem had the property of lots of k=v field and arbitrarily swappable ciphertexts?

1 month ago 1 0 1 0
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The problem with this paper is that every paragraph of it is screenshot-worthy.

1 month ago 12 0 1 1