Today, the team declared victory. They’ve finally verified the true value of a number called BB(5), which quantifies just how busy that fifth beaver is. They obtained the result — 47,176,870 — using a piece of software called the Coq proof assistant, which certifies that mathematical proofs are free of errors.

source: HN

Every time a block is broken in Minecraft versions Beta 1.8 through 1.12.2, the precise coordinates of the dropped item can reveal another player’s location. “Randar” is an exploit for Minecraft which uses LLL lattice reduction to crack the internal state of an incorrectly reused java.util.Random in the Minecraft server, then works backwards from that to locate other players currently loaded into the world.

source: HN

Now, by trade I’m a software engineer and a trainee scientist - I’ve never designed a book before. However, I’m no stranger to graphic design, having done a variety of things before now. But a book is a new proposition with different challenges. There was a lot of work ahead. But where to begin?

source: Dfly

Here, we’re looking at two main things: the calibration of a forecast — that is, whether events that we said would happen 30 percent of the time actually happened about 30 percent of the time — and how our forecast compared with an unskilled estimate that relies solely on historical averages. We can answer those questions using calibration plots and skill scores, respectively.

Go 1.20.2 fixed a small vulnerability in the crypto/elliptic package. The impact was minor, to the point that I don’t think any application was impacted, but the issue was interesting to look at as a near-miss, and to learn from.

source: L

The p-adic numbers are bizarre alternative number systems that are extremely useful in number theory. They arise by changing our notion of what it means for a number to be large. As a real number, 1 billion is huge. But as a 10-adic number, it is tiny!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-adic_number

Veritasium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRaq4aYPzCc

The JPEG algorithm is rather complex and in this video, we break down the core parts of the algorithm, specifically color spaces, YCbCr, chroma subsampling, the discrete cosine transform, quantization, and lossless encoding. The majority of the focus is on the mathematical and signal processing insights that lead to advancements in image compression and the big themes in compression as a whole that we can take away from it.

A new kind of computer architecture that’s more elegant than 1s and 0s, being based directly on Mathematics.

If you’ve done any 3D programming, you’ve likely encountered the zoo of techniques and representations used when working with 3D rotations. Some of them are better than others, depending on the situation.

source: HN

Pernosco accepts uploaded rr recordings from customers and replays them with binary instrumentation to build a database of all program execution, to power an amazing debugging experience. Our infrastructure is Intel-based AWS instances. Some customers upload recordings made on AMD (Zen) machines; for these recordings to replay correctly on Intel machines, instruction execution needs to produce bit-identical results. This is almost always true, but I recently discovered that the approximate arithmetic instructions RSQRTSS, RCPSS and friends do not produce identical results on Zen vs Intel. Fortunately, since Pernosco replays with binary instrumentation, we can insert code to emulate the AMD behavior of these instructions. I just needed to figure out a good way to implement that emulation.

source: HN

Bit strings, error correcting, and coloring the corners of higher dimensional cubes.

The @CryptoHack__ account was pinged today by ENOENT, with a CTF-like challenge found in the wild: Source tweet. Here’s a write-up covering how given a partially redacted PEM, the whole private key can be recovered. The Twitter user, SAXX, shared a partially redacted private RSA key in a tweet about a penetration test where they had recovered a private key. Precisely, a screenshot of a PEM was shared online with 31 of 51 total lines of the file redacted. As ENOENT correctly identified, the redaction they had offered wasn’t sufficient, and from the shared screenshot, it was possible to totally recover the private key.

source: L

We argue that the most important statistical ideas of the past half century are: counterfactual causal inference, bootstrapping and simulation-based inference, overparameterized models and regularization, multilevel models, generic computation algorithms, adaptive decision analysis, robust inference, and exploratory data analysis. We discuss common features of these ideas, how they relate to modern computing and big data, and how they might be developed and extended in future decades. The goal of this article is to provoke thought and discussion regarding the larger themes of research in statistics and data science.

source: danluu

My little donut.c has been making the rounds again, after being featured in a couple YouTube videos (e.g., Lex Fridman and Joma Tech). If I had known how much attention this code would get over the years, I would have spent more time on it.

A lot of my job is implementing specifications, and sometimes in a crypto spec you’ll encounter something like this and what you do is nod, copy it into a comment, break it down into a sequence of operations, and check that the result matches a test case. However, the other day I was having a bit of an identity crisis because I could not remember basic algebra, so I went and re-derived the edwards25519 point decoding formulas as a sort of homework. It turned out to be pretty useful for understanding pieces of the implementation I had been just treating as black boxes. I’m going to try to take you along for the ride, to show that there is no dark magic involved, and that we can all get to the same result as the specification with step-by-step high-school algebra.

Part of Computer Arithmetic. http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/cp02.htm

And How does a computer work? http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/cpint.htm

source: trivium

We showcase one example of how an attacker can inject a low order subgroup group element in threshold EdDSA protocol secure against malicious adversaries, bypassing existing protections.

source: green

The idea was simple, I’ve always felt that code readability is undervalued so I figured I’d put cold hard cash up. I announced a $1,000 pot, divided into $500, $300, and $200 prizes for the most readable implementations of Daniel Lemire’s nearly divisionless algorithm for selecting a random number from an interval. I now have winners to announce and congratulate, and they’re in this blog post, but there’s more to this story.

That may be over selling it, but cool anyway.

The age design includes a double invocation of X25519: once with a domain separation tweak, once with the actual secret. While implementing this I wondered: can we multiply those two scalars first, instead of doing two point multiplications in a row? It would be much faster!

Follow up: https://buttondown.email/cryptography-dispatches/archive/cryptography-dispatches-replace-pgp-with-an-https/