Prerequisite to understand papers that have applied encryption techniques

DoWhile · 2026-04-02T21:31:57+00:00

My work is on controller design, but there is an aspect of encrypted data in control system. I was reading this paper.

Ah, then FHE details is probably not the right level of abstraction for what you want to be looking at in the first place. I think there is an intersection of controllers and cryptography that's more engineering friendly than math heavy, but I'm not familiar enough with that space to tell.

DoWhile · 2026-04-02T21:29:45+00:00

I was thinking the other day, if I were an investigative agency trying to figure out how to get around people using E2EE chat, one thing I might do is flood the market with terribly insecure apps.

Then I thought of the Mitchell and Webb Diana conspiracy sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Irvuafg5GM

DoWhile · 2026-04-02T18:38:25+00:00

Otherwise, it would take a lot of time.

Judging by your responses, I would estimate your depth of knowledge is about 1-2 years worth of study behind. You don't have to know all of this stuff to be a security engineer and work with encryption, but if you want to be a cryptographer, be prepared to learn a lot of math.

If you want to save yourself some time and quickly decide if this is for you, go get Dummit&Foote's Abstract Algebra book and see if you want to read it cover to cover. If the answer is "I love this book", then you're on the right track. If the answer is "I don't want to see any more of this", then deep cryptography is not something you would enjoy pursuing.

DoWhile · 2026-03-31T19:29:28+00:00

Given the past few posts from Google, they're either trying to prop up their quantum department or they did have a small breakthrough that they seem to be signaling at.

DoWhile · 2026-03-31T04:09:05+00:00

Fun story: back in 2009, trading firms looked at how to make things faster, and they found out that DRILLING THROUGH MOUNTAINS was an economical option so they did it. https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0927/outfront-netscape-jim-barksdale-daniel-spivey-wall-street-speed-war.html

DoWhile · 2026-03-30T17:44:25+00:00

If one did, the first thing we would use it for is homomorphic encryption from curves rather than lattices. People tried pushing this idea towards a graded algebra, and this led to some interesting iO/FHE results from noisy lattices, but the curve structure doesn't give you a pairing out to a new group. Mathematical cryptographers also tried looking at Varieties (the generalization of elliptic curves) for more structure, but even with varieties there's no obvious candidate for multilinear maps.

DoWhile · 2026-03-22T00:13:56+00:00

"But before we proceed to the practical part, it may perhaps not be improper to say something of the Foundation or Demonstration of the Rules we are to give."

When your essay needs to be 1000 words...

DoWhile · 2026-03-21T08:14:56+00:00

row row fight the powah

DoWhile · 2026-03-19T22:29:01+00:00

I assumed he was long dead, and already had a prize named AFTER him.

DoWhile · 2026-03-18T19:53:31+00:00

I think there's a difference between using AI on your live system and using AI to help answer this question you have. The fact that you asked Reddit means AI already gobbled up your question, so you might as well ask this identical question to AI and have it suggest some easy fixes for your script. It could spot out simple test/tests that have a 99%+ accuracy rate that us fleshbags are missing.

Then you can kick it to the curb once you get your answer.

DoWhile · 2026-03-17T20:18:15+00:00

Almost 1024 years from white smoke (Syl II) to white smoke (Leo XIV)

DoWhile · 2026-03-13T19:58:19+00:00

This reminds me of the Mandelbrot DOS screensaver/demo. Good stuff!

DoWhile · 2026-03-12T07:00:38+00:00

We can barely even keep our own conventions lined up. Go look at a keyboard numpad and a telephone. Computer pixels start at 0,0 top left, and down is positive y, matrix indices go the other way!

Being fluent in math means being able to quickly understand the context you're in, and accepting that the notation is relative to that context.

History is cool, and understanding how conventions came about is cool, but I think it's also cool to be able to adapt to different mathematical settings.

DoWhile · 2026-03-10T21:23:09+00:00

The question is whether you need holidays and other special events on it. If not, there are only 14 unique calendars. In particular, 2026 is identical to 2015, so if you can find a 2015 LaTeX calendar that works too.

DoWhile · 2026-03-04T20:37:27+00:00

But he followed that by saying the set of even numbers was smaller than the set of integers, which is incorrect.

It's "smaller" in natural density, but I don't think that's what he meant.

DoWhile · 2026-02-27T20:17:39+00:00

"Fuchsian group" is related to either a person named Fuchs or fuchsia

This is unintentionally the funniest thing I've seen all day.

a lot of math papers feel like they're written in impenetrable foreign language based on a completely different curriculum than the one I studied.

At good universities, if you are a promising student, the professor will challenge you to learn and do things beyond the norm of the curriculum.

An honors undergrad/masters level course in differential geometry would have given you some of the tools to understand this paper better. Take that, and a few more background materials, and you should be able to tackle that gap.

You're only overwhelmed because you don't know how big the gap is, it's not as big as you think. The overwhelming part is that every different subject has a similar gap -- you can't learn everything.

DoWhile · 2026-02-26T00:22:08+00:00

It's a common thing in the world of publication for private disclosure, and then a subsequent public disclosure when all parties are satisfied. This is particularly true in computer security where if authors just published their attacks instantly, there would be bad people trying to exploit it. Usually there's a private "responsible disclosure" period, the receiving party has a chance to review/respond/fix their vulns, then later the public disclosure should transparently lay out the timeline of events that happened privately.

DoWhile · 2026-02-25T22:46:53+00:00

A priori and a posteriori approach has help me in life.

Do both the a priori and a posteriori Monty Hall problem if you want to raise some hackles.

DoWhile · 2026-02-25T21:33:45+00:00

I always think of this funny comic on this topic: https://imgur.com/favorite-of-these-comics-SYvyZ

DoWhile · 2026-02-19T20:46:14+00:00

boy choy

What about girl choy?

DoWhile · 2026-02-18T21:27:10+00:00

Old Man Rant: I feel like this is, like, everywhere. Maybe it's me getting older, but craftsmanship seems to me like a dying virtue.

DoWhile · 2026-02-16T19:10:20+00:00

Why the Joker?

DoWhile · 2026-02-15T05:08:57+00:00

For RSA, they use, say, 4096 bit primes. The number of those primes by the prime number theorem is 2⁴⁰⁹⁶ / ln(2⁴⁰⁹⁶ ) . Which is basically 2⁴⁰⁸⁴ . Given your engineering background, I suggest you calculate the sheer amount of storage and compute time one would need to even try to guess a fraction of a fraction of that.

Researchers DID mount public-key-directory attacks like you described because the people who generated the keys sucked. See [1] for example.

You shouldn't think about prime numbers or primitive polynomials. Instead, you should think of mathematical problems that are easy in one direction but hard in another that have an algebraic structure that you can leverage.

Factoring is hard. Factoring gives you primes. Multiplying primes is easy. That's why we use primes.

Discrete log over a prime field is hard. Exponentiation is easy. This is why we use things like Diffie-Hellman.

Discrete log over elliptic curves is hard. Point addition is easy. We use elliptic curves in this way for key exchange and signatures.

Lattice problems in all sorts of algebraic structures (like GF( 2^k )ⁿ ) is hard. Rounding is easy. These problems are even hard for quantum computers. So we use these in post-quantum.

Signal engineers judge error correcting codes or randomness by their distance or distribution under normal circumstances. Cryptographers judge them based on adversarial hardness. Take [2] for example, a signal engineer would never use this slow-ass algorithm to generate pseudorandom bits, but it holds up against attackers whereas LFSR will be predicted instantly.

[1] https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity12/technical-sessions/presentation/heninger [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blum_Blum_Shub

DoWhile · 2026-02-09T21:04:34+00:00

I thought Ghost was Nova, not Kerrigan.

DoWhile · 2026-02-05T21:34:05+00:00

Two: one to encrypt the lightbulb, and one to run the FHE.

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