Hacker News: sweis

Assessing Claude Mythos Preview's cybersecurity capabilities

sweis — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:11:31 +0000

Related: Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47679121

System Card: Claude Mythos Preview [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47679258

Also: Anthropic's Project Glasswing sounds necessary to me - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47681241

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47679155

Points: 307

# Comments: 52

New comment by sweis in "Stop Using Encrypted Email"

sweis — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 02:14:11 +0000

“ There was a bug in an OpenPGP library which finally gave us an excuse to tear encrypted email via PGP to shreds. Our special guest William Woodruff joined us to help explain the vuln and indulge our gnashing of teeth on why email was never meant to be encrypted and how other modern tools do the job much, much better.”

Stop Using Encrypted Email

sweis — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 02:14:11 +0000

Article URL: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2025/08/22/stop-using-encrypted-email-with-william-woodruff/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44992400

Points: 10

# Comments: 2

New comment by sweis in "How to pack ternary numbers in 8-bit bytes"

sweis — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 18:25:13 +0000

I dug into this once and the "theoretical ideal" of 3 originated in a 1950s paper about vacuum tube computers, which itself immediately backed off and said the choice of base 2 is frequently justified.

https://sweis.medium.com/revisiting-radix-economy-8f642d9f3c...

In this case, the context are {-1, 0, 1} weights in a LLM model, which I don't think is being used for any hardware efficiency argument. I think it's just quantizing weights into 3 states.

New comment by sweis in "Operation Triangulation: What you get when attack iPhones of researchers"

sweis — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 21:53:47 +0000

The video of the talk is online now too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VWNUUldBEE

New comment by sweis in "IBM demonstrates 133-qubit Heron"

sweis — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 22:11:11 +0000

The best estimate I've seen is that we need about 5-7 orders of magnitude more qubits and 1-2 orders of magnitude lower error rates: https://sam-jaques.appspot.com/quantum_landscape_2023

New comment by sweis in "OpenSSH 9.5 released with keystroke timing obfuscation"

sweis — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 17:10:00 +0000

Rambus bought Cryptography Research about 12 years ago: https://www.rambus.com/rambus-completes-acquisition-of-crypt...

New comment by sweis in "Debunking NIST's calculation of the Kyber-512 security level"

sweis — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 22:00:29 +0000

NIST P-256 curve seed came from the X9.62 specification drafted in 1997. It was provided by an NSA employee, Jerry Solinas, as an example seed among many other seeds, including those provided by Certicom. Read this for more details: https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1018

New comment by sweis in "Debunking NIST's calculation of the Kyber-512 security level"

sweis — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 21:58:43 +0000

"High q-bit proprietary technology" and "specialized de-latticing algorithms" are made up terms that nobody uses.

New comment by sweis in "How were the NIST ECDSA curve parameters generated?"

sweis — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 16:56:28 +0000

A post talking about how Jerry Solinas provided the NIST ECDSA curve parameters and anecdotes of how they were chosen.

How were the NIST ECDSA curve parameters generated?

sweis — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 16:56:28 +0000

Article URL: https://saweis.net/posts/nist-curve-seed-origins.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37706958

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

New comment by sweis in "UK pulls back from clash with Big Tech over private messaging"

sweis — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 19:17:14 +0000

NIST post-quantum standards resulted from a 8+ year process and public competition: https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/post-quantum-cryptography

New comment by sweis in "2048 Bit RSA and the Year 2030"

sweis — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 21:58:00 +0000

The record quantum computers can factor is 21 -- and that is by cheating by already knowing the factors are 3 and 7. There are other results that use special form composites which don't count.

So a QC can factor a 5 bit number with Shor's algorithm in 2023 (with some cheating). That record has not changed for 10+ years.

I publicly bet 8 years ago that nobody would factor the number 35 by 2030. I hope I'm proved wrong.

New comment by sweis in "Black-Hole Radiation Decoding Is Quantum Cryptography"

sweis — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 18:39:18 +0000

This is appearing at Crypto'23: https://crypto.iacr.org/2023/program.php

Video of a previous lecture is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xNk3B-4TKs

Black-Hole Radiation Decoding Is Quantum Cryptography

sweis — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 18:38:18 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.05491

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36483865

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by sweis in "Meshtastic is an encrypted communications platform for the Lora RF protocol"

sweis — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 23:28:38 +0000

Is this using unauthenticated AES-CTR mode?

https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-device/blob/0447808...

https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-device/blob/285413c...

Landscape of Quantum Computing in 2021

sweis — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 00:00:09 +0000

Article URL: https://sam-jaques.appspot.com/quantum_landscape

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31995213

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by sweis in "NIST announces first PQC algoritms to be standardized"

sweis — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 23:59:36 +0000

The record for factoring using a quantum computer is 21. Don't read that as 21 bits. 3*7. This has been the record for 12 years and that is arguably a result that is "cheating" with a priori knowledge of the factors.

There are some other examples of people factoring special-form composites that are particularly easy to factor on quantum computers, but those are basically stunts with no impact.

To threaten RSA, quantum computers need to increase the number qubits 6 orders of magnitude and improve the error correction at least 2 orders of magnitude. Check out this blog post for an illustration of where we are at: https://sam-jaques.appspot.com/quantum_landscape

New comment by sweis in "Ask HN: Best book on modern cryptography?"

sweis — Fri, 27 May 2022 19:31:05 +0000

Oded Goldreich's "Foundations of Cryptography" books are the rigorous, theoretical oriented books used in many grad-level crypto courses: https://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~oded/foc-book.html

Neil Koblitz has "A Course in Number Theory and Cryptography", which I haven't read, but is often used: https://www.amazon.com/Course-Number-Cryptography-Graduate-M...

Also, Boneh and Shoup is good and mentioned in other comments: https://toc.cryptobook.us/

New comment by sweis in "How to have a billion dollar exit with zero capital gains tax"

sweis — Tue, 10 May 2022 04:47:37 +0000

You can't just base a business in a QOZ and call it a QOZB. It needs to generate 50% of its gross income from within the zone and 40% of its intangible property (e.g. software) must be used for business within a zone.

Further, there are restrictions on what kind of business it can be. It can't be, for example, a golf course or a liquor store.