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.
Twitter's @bluesky Project
1 Feb 2021More 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:
Architecture of TPB and WikiLeaks
19 Jan 2021For obvious reasons, I recently got interested in how to build websites that are widely accessible but also resistant to censorship. Naturally, my first instinct was to run off and come up with my own blue-sky designs of the most resilient, censorship-resistant website in the world. But censorship is not new and I realized it would be smart to learn from the past: in particular, The Pirate Bay and WikiLeaks, which both continue to operate even under immense pressure to shutdown.