plus/minus epsilon
Hi, my name is Brendan and I'm a software engineer. Most of my experience is in cryptography but I'm trying to branch out. This is my blog where I write about stuff related to that. I'm also on GitHub, Mastodon, and have an email.
Some of my projects include...
- UtahFS - (Go) an encrypted storage system that provides a user-friendly FUSE drive backed by cloud storage.
- Messaging Layer Security - (spec) a protocol based on tree structures that enable asynchronous group keying with forward secrecy and post-compromise security.
- Cheap Transparency Log - (Go) a CT log implementation designed to use very cheap cloud infrastructure.
- IPFS Gateway Validator - (JS) A browser extension that validates resources served from an IPFS gateway.
- bn256 - (Go) an implementation of cryptographic pairings and GLV (lattice) reduction. 10-20x faster than the next-best implementation in the same language.
- FourQ - (Go) a fast elliptic curve. Arithmetic is done on a quadratic extension of the integers modulo the Mersenne prime 2127-1.
- OpenWhiteBox - (Go) implementations of several interesting mathematical primitives and prior work in white-box cryptography. Original constructions and cryptanalyses. [ Paper ]
- caesar - (Coffee) implementations of a few unusual cryptographic primitives.
Some fun things I built are...
Blog Posts
Mercy Housing
11 Aug 2022I’ve been curious for a long time about how nonprofit organizations play a role in the housing market so today I decided to read the published financials of Mercy Housing, one of the largest nonprofit developers in the US.
Derivatives for Banking Better
7 Aug 2021When I was doing the research for my last blog post, I was reading the website for Pacific Coast Banker's Bank and saw that one of the products they offered under "Loan Hedging" was called a back-to-back swap for converting fixed-rate loans to floating-rate. I had no idea what that was and I couldn't see what problem it solved, but I thought it sounded cool at least.
Reading Sterling's 10-Q
18 Jul 2021Today I decided to read Sterling Bank's most recent 10-Q, to get a better understanding of how a savings and loan bank works. This blog goes through it at a high-level with commentary and graphs.
The Death of Cars
18 Apr 2021Something that's a lot of fun for me is finding convincing visions of the future that are also dystopian. The best example of this I've found recently occurred to me while I was listening to a Tesla earnings call, where Elon Musk justified Tesla's market cap with recurring revenue from the future robo-taxi industry. Musk's theory of the future, and it's dystopian ending, goes like this:
The Opportunity for Crypto
26 Mar 2021I used to work on the Crypto Team at my company, and while I was there I got introduced to a lot of different crypto projects and asked to evaluate if they were something it made sense for us to support. The answer was usually no.