Taylor Hornby 🛡❤️

Security research ( EDM ( & board member @ Zcash Foundation.

[Matthew Prince 🌥 @eastdakota]

Some stats on #php2shell. In the 10 hours before it was publicly announced, across the @Cloudflare network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it. That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now.

[Thomas H. Ptacek @tqbf]

This is the first time I've ever seen a site do this, the obvious simple response to a disclosure of a vulnerability without a fix: sacrifice availability to preserve safety. This option should be why we do full disclosure.

[Taylor Hornby 🛡❤️ @DefuseSec]

Why on earth does IEEE 754 have a negative zero?

[dc @alchemyDC]

Yesterday the Zcash Foundation board named me Executive Director. Thank you to Alex for steady leadership through a tumultuous stretch, and to everyone who has reached out this week.

The job as I see it has two halves: 1) keep the infrastructure fast, secure, and boring. 2) make privacy something ordinary people use without having to think about it.

I don’t think privacy is a feature, and I don’t think it’s a niche. It’s the room a society needs to think, speak, associate, and change its mind. Any system people depend on for daily life should give them that room by default. That’s the standard I’ll hold our work to.

[Taylor Hornby 🛡❤️ @DefuseSec]

Looks like I moved my websites off PHP just in time

[Shielded Labs @ShieldedLabs]

Big milestone for Shielded Labs: the activation height for NU7 is being set today! The upgrade includes our first major mainnet deployment: the Network Sustainability Mechanism (NSM).

Like Bitcoin, Zcash faces a long-term challenge: how to sustain network security as block rewards decline. The NSM helps address that while preserving the 21 million coin cap.

ZIP-235 removes 60% of transaction fees from circulation, allowing that ZEC to be reissued as future block rewards. ZIP-237 starts that recycling around February 2031.

At current fee levels, that’s only about 210 ZEC per year. This is a modest first step, but we’re optimistic about how new use cases for the NSM could evolve over time and contribute to Zcash’s long-term security.

[Taylor Hornby 🛡❤️ @DefuseSec]

@wescopeland_ @J4ck3LSyN If someone else has figured it out, at that point the coordinated disclosure is just creating a false sense of security and it's more important defenders know it's out there.

[Zcash Foundation 🛡️ @ZcashFoundation]

The Zcash Foundation Board of Directors has appointed David Campbell as Executive Director.

Thank you, Alex Bornstein, for leading with a constant focus on bringing the Zcash ecosystem together. Welcome, David, a longtime member of this community.

https://t.co/ocr8tGNfvR

[Matthew Green @matthew_d_green]

Think about the chain of human decisions that’s involved in upgrading a big network full of hardware devices made by different vendors. Now think about how accessing that same network looks from the offensive side right now. It’s not even close to symmetrical.

[Steve Weis @sweis]

CLAUDE FOUND THE SEEDS
https://t.co/m8N6OPQoCQ

[janusz @januszg_]

shielded pools *do not* provide high levels of privacy if you use them as a pass through

"pass through" means you move funds into a pool and then withdraw them quickly after

shielded pools provide privacy if you hold funds at rest over a long period of time

[Taylor Hornby 🛡❤️ @DefuseSec]

I feel like the delta between human cryptanalysis and AI cryptanalysis will be greater for symmetric cryptography, no? Like an attack that actually breaks ECDLP would probably be comprehensible to humans but an attack that actually breaks AES probably wouldn't be.

[Taylor Hornby 🛡❤️ @DefuseSec]

Idc if you use AI in your music *but* if you do, it better be some other-wordly alien intelligence level shit

[🛡️ @shieldedmark]

I don't think people understand how cool it is that Zcash is open to cutting-edge techniques like Formal Verification and Private Information Retrieval. It makes being part of the ecosystem feel fresh and exciting in ways that the AI age has degraded otherwise.

[Matthew Green @matthew_d_green]

And specifically for cryptanalysts who are working with models and for the labs:

Folks, what we need right now are *negative* results. Silence is the worst thing you could be publishing.

[will brown @willcb]

"convert all 722 preprints into 3blue1brown videos. don't make mistakes."

[CyberMysticGarden - Marcelo Pinel @cybermistic]

🎠

[carl feynman @carl_feynman]

Everybody mathematical on my timeline is talking about what they see as the most marvelous result from the OpenAI knowledge dump. Shall we talk about which is the least marvelous? My candidate is #187, Snaky vs Breaker. It's a game played on an infinite chessboard. The players alternate coloring squares black and white. One player tries to make a particular pattern of six squares that looks like a snake. The other player tries to prevent that. It turns out that Snaky wins over Breaker in 21 moves. It's a tedious enumeration of thousands of cases, all of which are carefully spelled out in the paper. I read the paper; I don't think there are any important new techniques in it. It doesn't lead anywhere; it has no other mathematical consequences I can see. And I've never heard of the problem before. How did this make it onto the list?

[Taylor Hornby 🛡❤️ @DefuseSec]

@OpenAI All I want for christmas is a superlinear-time lower bound for SAT