I don’t consider myself exceptional in any regard, but I stumbled upon a few cryptography vulnerabilities in Matrix’s Olm library with so little effort that it was nearly accidental. It…

Earlier this year, I wrote about planned effort to design a federated Key Transparency proposal. The end goal for this work was constrained to building end-to-end encryption into a new type of Dire…

There are two mental models for designing a cryptosystem that offers end-to-end encryption to all of its users. The first is the Signal model. Predicated on Moxie’s notion that the ecosystem …

Ever since the Invisible Salamanders paper was published, there has been a quiet renaissance within my friends and colleagues in applied cryptography for studying systems that use Authenticated Enc…

In 2022, I wrote about my plan to build end-to-end encryption for the Fediverse. The goals were simple: Provide secure encryption of message content and media attachments between Fediverse users, a…

Every hype cycle in the technology industry continues a steady march towards a shitty future that nobody wants. CMYKat Note: I know this isn’t unique to the tech industry, but I can’t w…

Spoiler: It’s nothing scandalous or bad. Every once in a while, someone posts this photo on Twitter to attempt to dunk on furries: Midwest FurFest 2018 Over the years, I’ve seen this di…

If you’re new to reading this blog, you might not already be aware of my efforts to develop end-to-end encryption for ActivityPub-based software. It’s worth being aware of before you co…

Another wave of Twitter users are jettisoning the social media website in favor of alternatives. Some are landing in the Fediverse (Mastodon and other ActivityPub-enabled software). Others are goin…

This post is the first in a new series covering some of the reasoning behind decisions made in my project to build end-to-end encryption for direct messages on the Fediverse. (Collectively, Fedi-E2…

In 2010, Coda Hale wrote How To Safely Store A Password which began with the repeated phrase, “Use bcrypt”, where the word bcrypt was linked to a different implementation for various pr…

Recently, I shared my thoughts on the Twitter Exodus. The short of that post is: Even though I’m quite happy on the Fediverse, I think the best outcome is for Bluesky to “win” the…

What is it about being queer that makes loneliness, isolation, and rejection so much more intense than enduring than what our straight friends and family purport to experience? Harubaki Are we just…

4 free ideas that Soatok doesn’t have the time or energy to execute on.

I’ve spent the better part of 2023 and 2024 trying to imagine the specific changes we technology nerds could make to improve things somewhat. Meme remix of Matt Bors’s comic and Stan Ke…

I wrote what I thought would be the final blog post of 2024 last week, and was looking forward to starting 2025 strong with a blog I’d been drafting since July 2023. But then, a little after …

# Fedi-E2EE Public Key Directory Specification v0.1.0 released

This is not a production-ready specification. It is the basis I will use for developing the reference implementation.

https://github.com/fedi-e2ee/public-key-directory-specification/releases/tag/v0.1.0

Let’s talk about the Collatz Conjecture, which is like mathematicians’ original version of this programmer joke: Except the number of mathematician hours wasted is much larger, possibly…

Last year, I outlined the specific requirements that an app needs to have in order for me to consider it a Signal competitor. Afterwards, I had several people ask me what I think of a Signal fork c…

Last week, I wrote a blog post succinctly titled, Don’t Use Session. Two interesting things have happened since I published that blog: A few people expressed uncertainty about what I wrote ab…

It’s really not my place to ever command respect from anyone; and that’s not just because I’m a furry–which has always been towards the bottom of the geek hierarchy. I am we…