Steve Weis
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saweis.net
Steve Weis
@saweis.net
590 followers 240 following 46 posts
Security Engineer interested in cryptography, information security, & privacy engineering.
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Reposted by Steve Weis
malb.bsky.social
The list of accepted talk at @rwc.iacr.org is now available: rwc.iacr.org/2025/accepte... Early registration ends 26 February. CC: programme co-chair @nicksullivan.org
RWC 2025 accepted papers
Real World Crypto Symposium
rwc.iacr.org
February 2, 2025 at 12:14 PM
saweis.net
National Cryptologic Foundation event about accelerating post-quantum crypto adoption features some NSA speakers:
cryptologicfoundation.org/news-events/...
Upcoming Events
Upcoming NCF (or related) Events & Programs.
cryptologicfoundation.org
January 2, 2025 at 7:58 PM
saweis.net
Proud to be a member of the 1992 Team USA of blocklists with @filippo.abyssdomain.expert, @sockpuppet.org, and @leak.bsky.social
December 27, 2024 at 5:35 AM
saweis.net
Tour of WebAuthn by Adam Langley:
www.imperialviolet.org/tourofwebaut...
A Tour of WebAuthn
www.imperialviolet.org
December 23, 2024 at 7:16 PM
Reposted by Steve Weis
eprint.ing.bot
Hash-Prune-Invert: Improved Differentially Private Heavy-Hitter Detection in the Two-Server Model (Borja Balle, James Bell, Albert Cheu, Adria Gascon, Jonathan Katz, Mariana Raykova, Phillipp Schoppmann, Thomas Steinke) ia.cr/2024/2024
Abstract. Differentially private (DP) heavy-hitter detection is an important primitive for data analysis. Given a threshold t and a dataset of n items from a domain of size d, such detection algorithms ignore items occurring fewer than t times while identifying items occurring more than t + Δ times; we call Δ the error margin. In the central model where a curator holds the entire dataset, (ε,δ)-DP algorithms can achieve error margin $\Theta(\frac 1 \varepsilon \log \frac 1 \delta)$, which is optimal when d ≫ 1/δ. Several works, e.g., Poplar (S&P 2021), have proposed protocols in which two or more non-colluding servers jointly compute the heavy hitters from inputs held by n clients. Unfortunately, existing protocols suffer from an undesirable dependence on log d in terms of both server efficiency (computation, communication, and round complexity) and accuracy (i.e., error margin), making them unsuitable for large domains (e.g., when items are kB-long strings, log d ≈ 10⁴). We present hash-prune-invert (HPI), a technique for compiling any heavy-hitter protocol with the log d dependencies mentioned above into a new protocol with improvements across the board: computation, communication, and round complexity depend (roughly) on log n rather than log d, and the error margin is independent of d. Our transformation preserves privacy against an active adversary corrupting at most one of the servers and any number of clients. We apply HPI to an improved version of Poplar, also introduced in this work, that improves Poplar’s error margin by roughly a factor of $\sqrt{n}$ (regardless of d). Our experiments confirm that the resulting protocol improves efficiency and accuracy for large d. Image showing part 2 of abstract.
December 13, 2024 at 11:55 PM
Reposted by Steve Weis
kozolchyk.com
What's that? FIPS 140-3 validated ML-KEM? No biggie

aws.amazon.com/blogs/securi...
AWS-LC FIPS 3.0: First cryptographic library to include ML-KEM in FIPS 140-3 validation | Amazon Web Services
We’re excited to announce that AWS-LC FIPS 3.0 has been added to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CMVP) modules in process list. This ...
aws.amazon.com
December 10, 2024 at 9:03 PM
saweis.net
Google posting about new noisy quantum computer with better error correction:
blog.google/technology/r...
Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip
Our new quantum chip demonstrates error correction and performance that paves the way to a useful, large-scale quantum computer.
blog.google
December 9, 2024 at 6:20 PM
Reposted by Steve Weis
scwpod.bsky.social
NEW EPISODE!

Our esteemed guests @justinschuh.com and @matthewdgreen.bsky.social joined us to debate whether
`Dual_EC_DRBG` was intentionally backdoored by the NSA or 'just' a major fuckup:

securitycryptographywhatever.com/2024/12/07/d...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0eo...
Dual_EC_DRBG with Justin Schuh and Matthew Green
YouTube video by Security Cryptography Whatever
www.youtube.com
December 7, 2024 at 8:15 PM
saweis.net
Post by Meta about integrating logging into their crypto libraries:
engineering.fb.com/2024/11/12/s...
How Meta built large-scale cryptographic monitoring
Cryptographic monitoring at scale has been instrumental in helping our engineers understand how cryptography is used at Meta. Monitoring has given us a distinct advantage in our efforts to proactiv…
engineering.fb.com
December 4, 2024 at 10:11 PM
Reposted by Steve Weis
senykamara.com
If you’re curious about the design and analysis of encrypted algorithms and encrypted databases, I’m putting together a collection of resources at encryptedsystems.org
EncryptedSystems.org
encryptedsystems.org
December 3, 2024 at 4:02 PM
saweis.net
Simons is doing a bootcamp and program on obfuscation, proof systems, and secure computation: simons.berkeley.edu/programs/cry...
Cryptography 10 Years Later: Obfuscation, Proof Systems, and Secure Computation
This program will bring together researchers from different subareas of cryptography toward the goal of advancing some of the major research frontiers in the field.
simons.berkeley.edu
December 3, 2024 at 9:28 PM
Reposted by Steve Weis
zoracon.bsky.social
🔑
blog.trailofbits.com/2024/11/14/a...
Attestations: A new generation of signatures on PyPI
For the past year, we’ve worked with the Python Package Index (PyPI) on a new security feature for the Python ecosystem: index-hosted digital attestations, as specified in PEP 740. These attestatio…
blog.trailofbits.com
November 24, 2024 at 2:44 AM
saweis.net
@nyzn.bsky.social This is the peak tech career outcome.
November 22, 2024 at 5:32 PM
saweis.net
I want to see the grant proposal to give giant octopuses some MDMA to see what happens: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)30991-6
Just a moment...
www.cell.com
July 5, 2023 at 7:53 PM
Reposted by Steve Weis
scwpod.bsky.social
NEW EPISODE!

Why the hell do we think any of this cryptography stuff is secure anyway, with @saweis.net!

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-do-we-think-anything-is-secure-with-steve-weis/id1578405214?i=1000618720739
‎Security Cryptography Whatever: Why do we think anything is secure, with Steve Weis on Apple Podc...
‎Show Security Cryptography Whatever, Ep Why do we think anything is secure, with Steve Weis - Jun 29, 2023
podcasts.apple.com
June 29, 2023 at 4:18 PM
saweis.net
They say local journalism is dying.
June 26, 2023 at 4:01 AM
saweis.net
Twitter is sending out incoherent, unhinged recruiting messages.
June 21, 2023 at 3:33 AM
saweis.net
I want to know how I ended up in Twitter’s ads targeting demographic with Magellan and Fitzcarraldo.
June 20, 2023 at 3:39 AM
Reposted by Steve Weis
riana.bsky.social
Registration is now open for the 2nd annual Trust & Safety Research Conference, Sept. 28-29 at Stanford!

https://conferences.law.stanford.edu/tsrc/
Home - Trust and Safety Research Conference
Join us for two days of cross-professional presentations and conversations designed to push forward research on trust and safety. Registration is now open for the second annual Trust and Safety Resear...
conferences.law.stanford.edu
June 16, 2023 at 3:07 AM
Reposted by Steve Weis
eprint.ing.bot
$\mathsf{zkSaaS}$: Zero-Knowledge SNARKs as a Service (Sanjam Garg, Aarushi Goel, Abhishek Jain, Guru-Vamsi Policharla, Sruthi Sekar) ia.cr/2023/905
June 12, 2023 at 7:40 AM
Reposted by Steve Weis
malb.bsky.social
We'll close registrations for UK Crypto Day (London, 23 June 2023) next Friday. So if you plan on attending, please register before then at https://uk-crypto-day.github.io/2023/06/23/uk-crypto-day/
UK Crypto Day: 23 June 2023
Schedule
uk-crypto-day.github.io
June 8, 2023 at 7:33 AM
saweis.net
I like this type of reinforcement learning still able to find improvements in hand-optimized algorithms:
https://www.deepmind.com/blog/alphadev-discovers-faster-sorting-algorithms
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06004-9
Faster sorting algorithms discovered using deep reinforcement learning - Nature
 Artificial intelligence goes beyond the current state of the art by discovering unknown, faster sorting algorithms as a single-player game using a deep reinforcement learning agent. These algori...
www.nature.com
June 7, 2023 at 6:05 PM
Reposted by Steve Weis
fredericjacobs.com
🔐 HPKE (IETF's RFC9180) standardized secure and agile public key encryption.
🆕 In iOS 17, we provide a fast, safe and easy-to-use Swift HPKE API.
https://mastodon.social/@fj/110493724366950208

#WWDC #WWDC23
HPKE | Apple Developer Documentation
A container for hybrid public key encryption (HPKE) operations.
developer.apple.com
June 5, 2023 at 9:43 PM
saweis.net
“I just don’t see myself really using it”
- Me, simultaneously using 5 Apple products
June 5, 2023 at 8:39 PM
Reposted by Steve Weis
riana.bsky.social
Here are the teaching materials!

https://github.com/stanfordio/TeachingTrustSafety
riana.bsky.social Riana @riana.bsky.social · May 16
The Trust and Safety Teaching Consortium (a loose coalition of academic, industry & non-profit experts) has spent months creating teaching materials for T&S - and now, they’re launching! Wed. 5/24, 9am PST. Register: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_hQsG_jeVTTqFYiis8KujyQ#/registration
You are invited to join a webinar: Launching Open-Access Teaching Materials from the Trust and Safety Teaching Consortium | DATE at TIME Pacific Time. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar.
Hear from members of the Trust and Safety Teaching Consortium as they introduce 13 modules of open-access teaching materials on online safety. Topics include: Introduction to Trust and Safety; Government Regulation; Metrics and Measurement; Trust and Safety Ecosystem; Content Moderation; Information Environment; Terrorism, Radicalization, and Extremism; Harassment and Hate Speech; Child and Adult Sexual Exploitation; Suicide, Self-Harm, and Well-Being; Authentication, Identity, and Platform Manipulation; Types of Attack Surfaces; Emerging Technologies and Career Advice. The Trust and Safety Teaching Consortium is a loosely-organized coalition of academic, industry and non-profit experts in online trust and safety problems. Our goal is to create content that can be used to teach a variety of audiences about trust and safety issues in a wide variety of formats.
stanford.zoom.us
May 24, 2023 at 4:24 PM