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

Twitter's @bluesky Project

1 Feb 2021

More than a year ago, Jack Dorsey announced that he would be funding a project called @bluesky, which would work with the crypto community to create a decentralized standard for social media. He gives a lot of motivation for the project, particularly focusing on the lack of consumer choice in content moderation and amplification. Fundamentally, the core insight of the project is that social media companies are currently a vertical integration of two different services:

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