OPAW: Fuzzy Extractors are Practical

I miss Adrian Colyer's "The Morning Paper" where he discussed one research paper per day - it was a great read and I learned a lot. I'll probably never be able to match his quality and throughput, but I actually do read papers (or, more lazily, watch their presentations) and wanted to keep up Adrian's … Continue reading OPAW: Fuzzy Extractors are Practical →

ICA Demo

While driving the other day through a mountain pass the radio kept alternating between two stations which broadcast on the same frequency. It would play one station, loud and clear and after a few seconds switch to the other station. To me that's surprising, as I would have expected to listen to a mash of … Continue reading ICA Demo →

Solving the 8 Queens puzzle with bit operations

The 8 queens puzzle is a classic (and quite fun to solve) toy problem: place eight queens on a chess board in such a way that all queens could fully move without being obstructed by any other queen. While without practical applications, it illustrates a number of aspects of designing algorithms and implementing programmes: - … Continue reading Solving the 8 Queens puzzle with bit operations →

Stateless user sessions with encrypted session IDs

When trying to design for stateless services one finds it easy to reduce the information stored in an http session but for one piece: whether the client has authenticated against the server or not. Usually you would implement a proccess for authenticating like this: Client submits credentials (login / password) to the server Server checks … Continue reading Stateless user sessions with encrypted session IDs →