Thanks to the global chip shortage, for about two years certain electronic items are really hard to buy. This includes graphics cards, those things that make your display useful. They’re also beasts at cracking password hashes. Admittedly, I waited for the situation to resolve so I can buy a graphics card for a sane price and improve my hashcat experience, but I now think this is unlikely to happen anytime soon.
Continue readingIn the past few days, I had some fun trying to understand the inner workings of an APK file. Previously, I had only used the legendary JD-GUI as a decompiler for some CTF challenges. But when dealing with more complex code, I found that looking at the output of different decompilers can help. Hence, I did a little research to find more decompilers that use different approaches. This post serves as a little reference on how to build and use these tools.
Continue readingElliptic curve cryptography (ECC) has always been something I wanted to fully understand eventually. A recent project I worked on has brought me one step closer, but also revealed to me the true complexity of the topic. I am now convinced that I will probably never fully understand the maths behind ECC. However, I discovered something else that I find interesting, although it’s not necessarily easier: implementing given schemes. In this post, I want to take you on a journey to explore a state-of-the-art implementation of a cryptographic scheme.
Continue readingI was a bit busy in the past few months, but now I’m back to talk about some system security. During my Bachelor’s studies, I did a bit of reading on Control-Flow Integrity (CFI). Recently, I’ve stumbled upon a paper on CFI, and while giving it a read I found myself in the need of refreshing the basics. I thought I could use this opportunity to tell you about CFI and what current research is trying to achieve.
Continue readingI’m currently studying fast numeric code at university, where I’ve been confronted with the problem of optimizing the Walsh-Hadamard transform using SIMD intrinsics. To be honest, I don’t know a lot about the maths behind it, but apparently it has a lot of applications, specifically in cryptography, signal processing and quantum computing. Since it was so much fun to apply my fresh knowledge about intrinsics on a real-world problem, I thought it may be worth sharing this experience here on my blog.
Continue readingAutomation time! I finally made it. I finally switched over to using a static site generator. Until now I was writing pure HTML by hand. What a mess! I’ve been wanting to try Hugo for a while now. It’s just that it takes a while to become familiar with a new tool. Luckily, I already have some experience with static site generation so it didn’t take to long to identify the patterns.
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