Theory

• Bloom Filters and Probabilistic Data Structures: Trading Certainty for Speed · 2024-08-22

  Explore how Bloom filters, Count-Min sketches, and HyperLogLog sacrifice perfect accuracy for dramatic space and time savings—and learn when that trade-off makes sense.

• Amdahl’s Law vs. Gustafson’s Law: What They Really Predict · 2024-06-15

  When does parallelism pay off? Compare Amdahl’s and Gustafson’s models, see where each applies, and learn how to reason about speedups in practice.

• Interconnects: PCIe, CXL, NVLink, and the Emerging Composable-Disaggregated Architecture · 2024-03-08

  A deep technical survey of modern interconnects—PCIe generations 1-6, CXL.io/cache/memory protocols, NVLink and NVSwitch—and how they enable composable-disaggregated infrastructure.

• Transactional Memory: HTM, STM, and Why Intel TSX Kept Getting Disabled · 2024-02-25

  A deep analysis of transactional memory—hardware (Intel TSX, IBM POWER), software (STM), the transactional lock elision pattern, and the bug saga that repeatedly forced Intel to disable TSX via microcode.

• Simultaneous Multithreading: Resource Sharing, Security Implications, and the SMT Performance-Security Tradeoff · 2024-02-01

  A deep dive into SMT/Hyper-Threading: how frontend and backend resources are shared between threads, the security vulnerabilities like PortSmash and TLBleed, and the evolving performance-security tradeoff.

• VLIW and EPIC: The Multiflow Trace, Itanium, and Why Static Scheduling Lost to Out-of-Order · 2024-01-14

  A historical and technical analysis of VLIW and EPIC architectures—the Multiflow Trace, Intel Itanium—examining static scheduling, predication, rotating registers, and why out-of-order superscalar won the commercial battle.

• Designing A Distributed Transaction Log With Raft Consensus: A Step By Step Implementation And Failure Testing In Go · 2023-10-06

  A comprehensive technical exploration of designing a distributed transaction log with raft consensus: a step by step implementation and failure testing in go, covering key concepts, practical implementations, and real-world applications.

• Superscalar Processors: Register Renaming, Reorder Buffers, and How Modern Cores Extract ILP · 2023-09-28

  A microarchitectural deep dive into superscalar execution: register renaming, the reorder buffer, reservation stations, and the issue queue, examining how Haswell, M1, and Zen4 extract instruction-level parallelism from sequential code.

• Anonymous Communication: Onion Routing, Mix Networks, DC-Nets, and the Anonymity Trilemma · 2023-09-25

  A rigorous analysis of anonymous communication systems from Tor's onion routing through mix networks like Loopix and Nym to DC-nets, exploring the anonymity trilemma and traffic analysis resistance.

• Smart Contract Security: Reentrancy, Front-Running, and Verification with Certora and Foundry · 2023-09-15

  A rigorous treatment of smart contract vulnerabilities—reentrancy, integer overflow, front-running/sandwich attacks—and the modern verification toolkit including the Certora Prover and Foundry fuzzing framework.

• Blockchain Consensus: Nakamoto Consensus, Casper FFG, Tendermint BFT, and the Safety-Liveness Tradeoff · 2023-07-02

  A rigorous analysis of blockchain consensus protocols from PoW through PoS to BFT, exploring the fundamental safety-liveness tradeoff in permissionless settings and the role of finality gadgets.

• Formal Verification of Cryptographic Protocols: ProVerif, Tamarin, and the TLS 1.3 Verification Story · 2023-04-06

  An exploration of the Dolev-Yao model, ProVerif and Tamarin provers, computational soundness results, and how formal methods proved TLS 1.3 secure before deployment.

• Microarchitectural Attacks: Spectre, Meltdown, and the Transient Execution Apocalypse · 2023-04-06

  A deep analysis of Spectre v1-v4, Meltdown, and the root cause in speculative execution, covering the endless cycle of mitigations and new attack variants that exploit the microarchitectural state.

• Side-Channel Attacks: Timing, Power Analysis, Cache-Timing, and the Constant-Time Discipline · 2023-04-04

  A rigorous exploration of side-channel cryptanalysis from Kocher's 1996 timing attack through differential power analysis to cache-timing attacks like Prime+Probe and Flush+Reload, with the countermeasure of constant-time programming.

• Searchable Encryption: Querying Encrypted Databases, Forward Privacy, and the Leakage-Abuse Frontier · 2023-03-31

  An in-depth analysis of symmetric searchable encryption from Curtmola et al. through forward privacy, leakage-abuse attacks, and the modern systems that balance security with performance.

• Format-Preserving Encryption: The FFX Mode, Rank-Encipher-Unrank, and Legacy Database Protection · 2023-02-25

  A technical deep dive into FPE: the Feistel-based FFX mode with AES, the rank-encipher-unrank construction, and practical applications in encrypting legacy databases and tokenization systems without breaking schemas.

• Threshold Cryptography: Distributed Key Generation, Threshold ECDSA, and the Validator Use Case · 2023-02-03

  A rigorous look at threshold cryptography from Shamir secret sharing through GJKR distributed key generation to modern threshold ECDSA and BLS signatures for blockchain validators.

• Verifiable Delay Functions: Wesolowski, Pietrzak, and the Sequentiality Assumption · 2023-01-21

  An exploration of VDFs from their cryptographic foundations through practical constructions, with emphasis on randomness beacons, blockchain consensus, and the sequential computation lower bounds.

• Oblivious RAM and Private Information Retrieval: Hiding Access Patterns from the Storage Server · 2023-01-10

  A comprehensive tour of ORAM and PIR: the square-root construction, tree-based Path ORAM, computational and information-theoretic PIR schemes, and the fundamental lower bounds that constrain the overhead.

• Multi-Party Computation: From Yao's Garbled Circuits to the SPDZ Line · 2022-12-26

  A deep exploration of secure multi-party computation, tracing the intellectual arc from Yao's millionaires' problem through the SPDZ practical framework, with full protocol detail and modern applications.

• Analytic Combinatorics: The Symbolic Method, Generating Functions, and Average-Case Algorithm Analysis · 2022-11-09

  A rigorous exploration of analytic combinatorics—the symbolic method for deriving generating functions, singularity analysis, saddle-point asymptotics, and applications to average-case analysis of algorithms and random structures.

• From Lru To Arc: A Technical Survey Of Cache Eviction Policies And Their Performance In Web Scale Distributed Caches · 2022-10-30

  A comprehensive technical exploration of cache eviction policies, from LRU to ARC, covering their performance in web-scale distributed caches, key concepts, practical implementations, and real-world applications.

• Additive Combinatorics: Szemerédi's Theorem, Sumset Inequalities, and Applications in Property Testing · 2022-10-25

  A rigorous exploration of additive combinatorics—Szemerédi's theorem on arithmetic progressions, Plünnecke-Ruzsa inequalities, the Balog-Szemerédi-Gowers theorem, and their applications in property testing and pseudorandomness.

• Combinatorial Designs and Coding Theory: Block Designs, Steiner Systems, and Finite Geometry · 2022-10-10

  An exploration of combinatorial design theory—block designs, Steiner systems, finite projective planes—and their deep connections to error-correcting codes and experimental design.