Thursday, January 23, 2014

I'm not dead. Happy New Year!

I apologize if this blog is starting to look a little abandoned.  It's not (I promise) I just had to go on hiatus for a few months.

I started a new job in September (Director of Technology for a school district) and it has kept me very busy.  Over the new few months, I'm planning a handful of posts on technical topics plus a few about the realities of trying to run an IT department.

Here are the next three posts that I have in mind:

  • Understanding Diffie-Hellman and the Discrete Logarithm Problem
  • The Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem
  • Understanding Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator (Dual EC DRBG)
Dual EC DRBG is the random number generator that the NSA supposedly put a backdoor into.  The first two posts that I'm planning are just to provide background information so that readers can understand the third one.  The third post will explain how Dual EC DRBG actually works and why it's susceptible to key escrow/backdoors.

Understanding Scope in Go

As per my New Year's resolution, I've been learning to program in Go and reading  The Go Programming Language .   On page 141 of the...