Notes on cryptography, programming, and information security.
Faster addition and subtraction on modern CPUs Do you remember how to do long addition on paper? ¹¹ ¹ 6876 + 3406 ------ 10282 Starting from the “ones” position, we add 6 + 6 = 12, write down a 2 and carry a 1. We proceed to the left, one position at a time, until there are no more digits to add. When implementing addition for large integers (e.g. 2 64 and above), it’s common to write code that…
For programmers new to cryptography, there are plenty of “known unknowns” – unfamiliar terms like “elliptic curves” and “random oracles”, and unnecessarily long acronyms (“RSASSA-PKCS-v1_5”, like really?). But what really gives cryptography its reputation is the unknown unknowns. The things that catch even experienced developers by surprise. Quick, where’s the vulnerability in this code? (I used…