About: A collection of links and short
commentary, published weekly. In theory the inclusion criteria
are for it to be something I read last week (duh) and was either
particularly interesting or something I might want to refer to
later.
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2017-10-16
Branch Prediction and the Performance of Interpreters – Don’t Trust Folklore> We show that the accuracy of branch prediction on interpreters
has been dramatically improved over the three last
Intel processor generations. This accuracy on Haswell, the
most recent Intel processor generation, has reached a level
where it can not be considered as an obstacle for performance
anymore.
Breaking DKIM - on Purpose and by Chance> This article questions the quality of this proof by showing how fragile DKIM is as used in practice. It gets shown how in relevant cases the content of a mail can be changed without invalidating the DKIM signature, thus severely undermining the trust one should have in the signature. It gets also shown how easily DKIM breaks by chance and makes the recipient believe that the mail was spoofed even though it was not. And finally it is shown how DKIM can be used properly to actually meet most of the trust expected from it.
Modern anti-spam and E2E cryptoThe tradeoff between privacy and fighting abuse, and what that means for encryption in decentralized systems like email.