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cr.yp.to
Personal blog · cr.yp.toprogrammingsecuritysystems
cr.yp.to is a personal blog at cr.yp.to about programming, security and systems. Since 2008, 648 different Hacker News readers have linked it 1,199 times, most often “A plea for lean software (1995) [pdf]”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Sometimes recommended · 8 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link cr.yp.to for D. J. Bernstein's cryptography and Unix/mail writing and the papers it hosts, mostly as citations supporting their own arguments.
- Recommended for · 8 comments
- Called interesting, well documented, easy to understand, and awesome by default; a quote called among the greatest.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- A plea for lean software (1995) [pdf]26 people · 28 mentions · first linked 2016-03-11
- The IPv6 Mess (2002)24 people · 34 mentions · first linked 2016-01-04
- Some thoughts on security after ten years of qmail 1.0 (2007) [pdf]24 people · 29 mentions · first linked 2009-03-19
- How to Write Software with Zero bugs – 25 years after qmail 1.0 – D. Bernstein [pdf]20 people · 23 mentions · first linked 2016-10-13
- The IPv6 Mess18 people · 24 mentions · first linked 2008-05-18
- The qmail security guarantee18 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2009-05-21
- /daemontools.html18 people · 18 mentions · first linked 2009-05-19
- /antiforgery/cachetiming-20050414.pdf16 people · 17 mentions · first linked 2009-06-24
- D.J.Bernstein's 'Internet Mail 2000' 15 people · 18 mentions · first linked 2008-03-24
- /14 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2009-03-15
What Hacker News says?
CF's success (especially in the free plan) suggests that this might be actually true---I'm afraid I cannot prove or disprove the claim (that's why I believe so). My observation comes from drawing the parallel to djb's Internet Mail 2000 [1], which tries to counter spams by changing mail storage to the sender's responsibility. [1] https://cr.yp.to/im2000.html
Comment linking /im2000.html
on “Cloudflare Reverse Proxies Are Dumping Uninitialized Memory”Submitted Making sure crypto remains insecure [pdf] as a story · 439 points
HN discussionCrit-bit trees [0]. Also known as TRIES, with an interesting use described in "TRASH - A dynamic LC-trie and hash data structure", which combines a trie with a hash function [1]. Also ROPE, a string allowing for prepends, substrings, middle insertions and appends [2] [0] http://cr.yp.to/critbit.html [1] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.96.... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope_%28data_str…
Comment linking /critbit.html
on “Ask HN: What are some cool but obscure data structures you know about?”Submitted Notes by djb on using Fil-C as a story · 365 points
HN discussionnow would be a good time read this in his memory https://cr.yp.to/bib/1995/wirth.pdf Also, his Oberon system provides a rich seam to mine. This, from a symposium held at ETH Zurich on the occasion of his 80th birthday in 2014, is a whirlwind retrospective. "Reviving a computer system of 25 years ago" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXY78gPMvl0 One of the greats.
Comment linking /bib/1995/wirth.pdf
on “Niklaus Wirth has died”Submitted IEEE Refuses to Accept Public-Domain Papers? as a story · 262 points
HN discussionI do this, too. It's called HOSTS and djb's cdb constant database. And one does not need to use a recursive cache to get the IP addresses. Fetching them non-recursively and dumping them to a HOSTS and a cdb file can sometimes be faster; I have a script that does that. Fetching them from scans.io can be even faster. cd||exit [ -c null ]||mknod null c 2 2 case $# in 0) { sed ' /#/d; /^[0-9]/!d; ' /etc/hosts \ |{ while…
Comment linking /cdb.html
on “DDoS Attack Against Dyn Managed DNS”Submitted Don't Publish with IEEE (2005) as a story · 239 points
HN discussionWhat if instead of JSON, i.e., strings of unknown length, used something more like netstrings. https://cr.yp.to/proto/netstrings.txt Personally I use a lame but effective simple 85.9 KiB static binary filter, a small C program, that removes the chunk sizes so the response is ready for use by other programs, e.g., in a pipe. Buffer is set at 8 KiB. Is there a way to experiment with one of these streaming JSON GPT API…
Comment linking /proto/netstrings.txt
on “Bruno: Fast and Git-friendly open-source API client (Postman alternative)”Submitted The death of optimizing compilers [pdf] as a story · 217 points
HN discussion"sendmail gets rather confused by bytes between 128 and 159; it uses them for internal macro handling." https://cr.yp.to/immhf/header.html That's got to be a sitter of a security hole for something, right?
Comment linking /immhf/header.html
on “It's time to head back to RSS?”Submitted UTC, Tai, and Unix Time (2001) as a story · 142 points
HN discussionI believe Gmail will thread when the message I'd and/or references reference each other. (Otherwise it's hit or miss, like you said.) https://cr.yp.to/immhf/thread.html
Comment linking /immhf/thread.html
on “It's time to head back to RSS?”Submitted A plea for lean software (1995) [pdf] as a story · 133 points
HN discussionIf you're a new implementor, you'll be shocked at how badly 822 was designed. Extracting even the simplest information from a message---the author's address, for example, or the sending date---is excruciatingly painful. And I see no sign that we'll ever be rid of the horrors of 822 syntax; how can we convince users to convert their old mailboxes to a sensible new format? https://cr.yp.to/immhf.html
Comment linking /immhf.html
on “It's time to head back to RSS?”Submitted Each socket should have two file descriptors as a story · 120 points
HN discussionThis once again shows why complexity is evil in cryptography. The likelihood of a vulnerability in a cryptosystem increases exponentially with the number of state transitions it has. http://cr.yp.to/talks/2015.10.05/slides-djb-20151005-a4.pdf
Comment linking /talks/2015.10.05/slides-djb-20151005-a4.pdf
on “Key Reinstallation Attacks – Breaking WPA2 by Forcing Nonce Reuse”Submitted Two File Descriptors for Sockets as a story · 109 points
HN discussionI had an insight a few months back when I was looking at djb's website ( http://cr.yp.to/djb.html ). I was spending far too much time playing with toys (static site generators) and not enough time actually producing interesting content. Nobody cares about your pretty blog theme, they care about your ideas .
Comment linking /djb.html
on “This is a web page”Submitted Calculus for mathematicians (1997) [pdf] as a story · 106 points
HN discussionAlso relevant: Whitfield Diffie's 1988 paper, "The First Ten Years of Public-Key Cryptography"[1]. [1] https://cr.yp.to/bib/1988/diffie.pdf
Comment linking /bib/1988/diffie.pdf
on “Diffie and Hellman Win Turing Award”Submitted Crit-bit Trees: the best way to store sets as a story · 106 points
HN discussionGenerally, come up with a set of operations that you want to use that meet your design criteria (fast in hardware, fast in software, fast in SIMD, whatever), then brute-force the instruction order and/or arbitrary constants (rotations) to minimize known attacks and maximize diffusion e.g. the Chacha20 design document explains the choices made in a fairly high level and easy to understand way: https://cr.yp.to/chacha…
Comment linking /chacha/chacha-20080128.pdf
on “Show HN: SHA-256 explained step-by-step visually”Submitted Crit-bit trees as a story · 98 points
HN discussionIn (at least) the US this wouldn't hold up in court if they went after you: https://cr.yp.to/softwarelaw.html . Of course if WhatsApp detected an abnormal or tampered version of the app, they can suspend or disable your account. I'm sure security labs that do reverse engineering of this sort probably do it on test handsets with burner numbers and identities so it wouldn't affect any personal accounts they use.
Comment linking /softwarelaw.html
on “Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?”Submitted The PowerPC Compiler Writer's Guide (1996) [pdf] as a story · 95 points
HN discussionD. J. Bernstein (of qmail/daemontools fame) spoke of it over a decade ago as well. https://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html
Comment linking /hardware/ecc.html
on “ECC matters”Submitted Making sure software stays insecure [pdf] as a story · 94 points
HN discussionThe full story is interesting and well documented: https://cr.yp.to/export.html Personally my favorite part of the history is on the “Dishonest behavior by government lawyers” page: https://cr.yp.to/export/dishonesty.html - the disclaimer at the top is hilarious: “This is, sad to say, not a complete list.” Indeed! Are you implying that he didn’t contribute to the first win before or during EFF involvement? Are you f…
Comment linking /export/2003/10.15-bernstein.txt
on “NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit against the US government”Submitted Boring Crypto [pdf] as a story · 91 points
HN discussion
