Name

Erin Alexis Owen Shepherd


Index

A better moderation system is possible for the social web

The Fediverse has a bit of a moderation problem. In fact, it’s had one for quite a while. When I wrote the first draft of the ActivityPump spec back in 2014, it had an Authorization section which began like this: Authorization This is a stub, to be expanded. OAuth 2.0 is an open question. ActivityPump uses authorization for two purposes; first, to authenticate clients to servers, and secondly in federated implementations to authenticate servers to each other.

Permutations: Replacing the block cipher?

History For the past few decades, the block cipher has been the primary symmetric cryptographic primitive. Aside from the odd stream cipher (primarily RC-4), pretty much every common cryptographic primitive from before 2010 can be seen as built from a block cipher. Quick note: How do we define a block cipher? A block cipher is a function with the form c = f(p, k) where c, p are an N-bit ciphertext and plaintext respectively, and k is an M-bit key.