<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: nwf</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nwf</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Mon, 04 May 2026 08:40:03 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=nwf" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwf in "Formal CHERI: design-time proof of full-scale architecture security properties (2022)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's only mostly true; Big CHERI (that is, the 64-bit CHERI systems, not CHERIoT) specifically has support for running legacy binaries within capability confinement.  It's true that we think recompiling is generally the better approach, but we can sandbox pre-CHERI libraries, for example, at library-scale granularity.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 29 Aug 2024 00:21:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41385872</link><dc:creator>nwf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41385872</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41385872</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwf in "Formal CHERI: design-time proof of full-scale architecture security properties (2022)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>FWIW...<p>Morello boards are hard to come by, but there have been efforts to offer cloud-computing style use of them, especially now that bhyve support exists; if you're interested I can try to find out more (I'd offer you time on <i>my</i> cloud-computing Morello cluster from MSR, but it's offline for silly reasons).  The "Big CHERI" RISC-V FPGA boards are indeed quite expensive, but CHERIoT-Ibex runs on the Arty A7 or the purpose-built Sonata board, and those are much more reasonable.  (I'd still love to see it brought up on cheaper boards, too...)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 29 Aug 2024 00:18:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41385846</link><dc:creator>nwf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41385846</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41385846</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwf in "Formal CHERI: design-time proof of full-scale architecture security properties (2022)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> it doesn't matter too much whether the emulator is CHERI or not since Rust itself lets me express memory safety in the type system<p>You might be interested in a <i>very</i> timely blog post: <a href="https://cheriot.org/cheri/myths/2024/08/28/cheri-myths-safe-languages.html" rel="nofollow">https://cheriot.org/cheri/myths/2024/08/28/cheri-myths-safe-...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 29 Aug 2024 00:14:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41385821</link><dc:creator>nwf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41385821</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41385821</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwf in "Snmalloc: A Message Passing Allocator"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> I wonder to what extent moving bounds checks into hardware provides the potential for efficient memory safety.<p>It's great!  The CHERI team at U. Cambridge has recently released their initial performance characterization of Morello, Arm's experimental ARMv8 w/ CHERI: <a href="https://ctsrd-cheri.github.io/morello-early-performance-results/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://ctsrd-cheri.github.io/morello-early-performance-resu...</a> .  The major take-away there is a little buried, but is:<p>> The above 1.8% to 3.0% is our current best estimate of the geometric mean overhead that would be incurred for a future optimized design<p>That seems to be well within people's tolerance for security features, especially as we think having CHERI would also allow us to turn off, and so stop paying for, some existing mitigations.<p>While there's a wealth of stuff to read about CHERI (<a href="https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/cheri-publications.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/cheri...</a>), if you're new to it and want something more presentation flavored than text, you might enjoy my talk from HOPE 2022: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH7QUdXeVrI">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH7QUdXeVrI</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 12 Oct 2023 14:05:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37857345</link><dc:creator>nwf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37857345</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37857345</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[What’s the Smallest Variety of CHERI?]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2022/09/06/whats-the-smallest-variety-of-cheri/">https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2022/09/06/whats-the-smallest-variety-of-cheri/</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32742699">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32742699</a></p>
<p>Points: 2</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 06 Sep 2022 20:20:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2022/09/06/whats-the-smallest-variety-of-cheri/</link><dc:creator>nwf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32742699</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32742699</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Confidence in Confinement: An Axiom-Free, Mechanized Verification [pdf]]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="http://www.doerrie.us/assets/doerrie-dissertation-jhu.pdf">http://www.doerrie.us/assets/doerrie-dissertation-jhu.pdf</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12083259">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12083259</a></p>
<p>Points: 1</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 13 Jul 2016 00:33:38 +0000</pubDate><link>http://www.doerrie.us/assets/doerrie-dissertation-jhu.pdf</link><dc:creator>nwf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12083259</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12083259</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwf in "Apple File System"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You don't sign the whole image as a stream, and you don't sign every block.  Recursion is your friend!  You sign the Merkle tree root, check it once, and then check O(log n) hashes per block access.  You can, of course, amortize the checking of the first several of those hashes as a further optimization that ties in easily with your caching layer.<p>There's no such thing as "the block doesn't decrypt" absent MACs/MICs or AEAD schemes -- encryption and decryption are just maps from N bytes to N bytes.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 14 Jun 2016 01:14:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11899094</link><dc:creator>nwf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11899094</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11899094</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwf in "A conversation with Sussman on AI and asynchronous programming"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You may be interested in reading, if you haven't, our 2011 position paper on Dyna.  (The 2012 paper on what I think you would call propagator networks was fun, but is nothing you don't know already, I'm sure.)<p><a href="http://dyna.org/wiki/index.php/Publications" rel="nofollow">http://dyna.org/wiki/index.php/Publications</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 15 Oct 2015 03:45:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10391221</link><dc:creator>nwf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10391221</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10391221</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwf in "Trusty URIs: Verifiable, Immutable, and Permanent Digital Artifacts [pdf]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Thanks for your response; it does clarify things.<p>But, I don't think I understand your concern about abstract hashing and how it would need to be something fundamentally new.  Both the order normalization and self-reference are simply preprocessing stages on your data, albeit slightly different forms.  The sortedness requirement, I think, is captured by MIME type parameters (the "charset=" in "text/html;charset=UTF-8"), as it does not change the fact that the document is an RDF graph.  For the placeholder trick, I think you're right and that you'd want something like a "text/rdf+selfref" MIME type to indicate that it is not in fact valid RDF until preprocessing has been performed.  All told, your RDF module would be described in MIME as something like "text/rdf+selfref;sorted=".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 17 Oct 2014 18:46:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8472680</link><dc:creator>nwf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8472680</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8472680</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwf in "Trusty URIs: Verifiable, Immutable, and Permanent Digital Artifacts [pdf]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Agitate browser implementers to add support for magnet: URIs and you can do exactly that without needing to add new attributes to HTML. :)<p>There's a bug for firefox here: 
<a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=528148" rel="nofollow">https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=528148</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 17 Oct 2014 18:10:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8472439</link><dc:creator>nwf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8472439</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8472439</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwf in "Trusty URIs: Verifiable, Immutable, and Permanent Digital Artifacts [pdf]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>First off, let me say that I'm always happy to see people thinking about the robustness of scientific data.  It's a thing we do not do well at all, at present, and should be much more urgent, given its importance to the enterprise.  However, this work has a number of small problems and mostly seems like rehashing (no pun intended) well-trodden ground.<p>Like so many similar works, this fails to cite the magnet: URI scheme (see, for starters, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_URI_scheme" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_URI_scheme</a>) of which trusty URLs and the cited niURI scheme both seem to be small subsets.  Introduced in 2002, these already defined a way of stably identifying an immutable object and providing one (or more!) suggestions for retrieval, which the present paper calls "authorities" but are likely better viewed as caches; one cache may be authoritative, but that's optional.  The "modules" defined are probably better encoded as MIME types (and could be integrated into a magnet URI as "x.mime=.../..." attributes; the draft standard does not have a field for MIME type, sadly), rather than introducing yet another namespace for describing document types.<p>Speaking of caches, the paper's assertion that "any artifact that is available on the web for a sufficiently long time will remain available forever" is extremely worrying; the search engines of the Internet (other than Internet Archive, perhaps) are not altruistic entities out to serve your data forever.  Their caches cannot and must not be depended upon by the scientific community; we must host our own data or pay for its archival, as much as that may be painful.  There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.<p>The trick for deriving self-reference is analogous to how IP packets carry their own checksum; it's an old trick, dating back to at least RFC 791 (section 3.1, heading Header Checksum; earlier RFCs do not seem to ) but almost surely earlier, and probably merits a citation of something.  The use of the same technique for Skolemization is cute, providing a nice workaround for RDF's poor handling of existentials.<p>The performance numbers are worrying; streaming a search-and-replace pass (to transform out self-references) followed by a SHA256 verification through 177GB of data should not take 29 hours, especially given that the data is already sorted.  CheckSortedRdf and CheckLargeRdf both exhibit linear time in figure 3, suggesting that the data being verified is already sorted (which would be consistent with earlier assertions that the existing implementation only generates sorted files); a better comparison would be to show CheckLargeRdf on randomized inputs, as all we see now is the overhead of a pre-processing pass that is, essentially, just verifying the sortedness of input.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 17 Oct 2014 18:06:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8472419</link><dc:creator>nwf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8472419</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8472419</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwf in "Analyzing the FBI’s Explanation of How They Located Silk Road"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Unfortunately, the technology you need to do that is not yet finished: <a href="https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/9498" rel="nofollow">https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/9498</a><p>ETA: I should have said "one possible technology"; there may be others, but I am pretty sure that an IP-less Tor node requires that you play the Tor Bridge game and stream the Tor protocol over a non-IP link.  I have had a prototype of this design running, but have yet to have it to a point I consider robust.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 08 Sep 2014 02:02:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8283129</link><dc:creator>nwf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8283129</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8283129</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwf in "The Heartbleed Bug"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>As far as I can tell, openvpn with TLS authentication is vulnerable as it just uses the usual TLS suite.  If you use PSKs or the (mis-named?) --tls-auth PSK additional MAC, then you are only owned if one of your own legitimate nodes revealed the PSK (or was coopted into performing this attack) in which case you're already owned.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 08 Apr 2014 04:31:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7551439</link><dc:creator>nwf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7551439</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7551439</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwf in "TextSecure: Forward secrecy for asynchronous messages"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Any possibility of adding this kind of functionality to libotr?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 23 Aug 2013 05:55:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6261931</link><dc:creator>nwf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6261931</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6261931</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwf in "TCP simultaneous open and peer to peer networking"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>While on the topic of clever UDP-based NAT traversal techniques, I think my favorite to date is pwnat [<a href="http://samy.pl/pwnat/" rel="nofollow">http://samy.pl/pwnat/</a>].  Uses ICMP in a clever way, requires no 3rd party.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 01 Jul 2013 07:14:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5969201</link><dc:creator>nwf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5969201</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5969201</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwf in "No, ZFS really doesn't need an fsck tool"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>A slight disagreement: the advantage of a ZFS online consistency checker would be to help ensure that there are no bugs in ZFS.<p>It appears that ZFS lacks a full consistency checker -- scrub only walks the tree and computes checksums; notably absent in this procedure appears to be validating the DDT.  While ZFS claims to be always on-disk consistent--and I certainly believe that the intent is that it be so!--I seem to have tripped over some bug ( <a href="http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-fs/2013-March/016627.html" rel="nofollow">http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-fs/2013-March/016...</a> ) which corrupted the DDT, and now I have no way of rebuilding it, so I dropped $$$ (for me) on a new disk array and zfs send | zfs recv so that everything rebuilt.  That's sort of crazy, if I may be so bold.<p>I suppose I could take the pool offline for several days and poke at it with zdb, but that is not really desirable either.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 29 Mar 2013 19:57:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5462699</link><dc:creator>nwf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5462699</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5462699</guid></item></channel></rss>