Blog
Posts, notes, and articles.
VLIW and EPIC: The Multiflow Trace, Itanium, and Why Static Scheduling Lost to Out-of-Order
2024-01-14A 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.
Sealing the Supply Chain: Zero-Trust Build Pipelines That Scale
2023-10-08An engineer’s map for rebuilding the software supply chain around zero-trust principles without stopping delivery.
Designing A Distributed Transaction Log With Raft Consensus: A Step By Step Implementation And Failure Testing In Go
2023-10-06A 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
2023-09-28A 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
2023-09-25A 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.
File Systems and Storage Internals: How Data Persists on Disk
2023-09-22A comprehensive exploration of file system architecture, from inodes and directories to journaling and copy-on-write. Understand how operating systems organize, protect, and efficiently access persistent data.
Smart Contract Security: Reentrancy, Front-Running, and Verification with Certora and Foundry
2023-09-15A 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.
Memory Allocators: From malloc to Modern Arena Allocators
2023-09-14A deep dive into memory allocation strategies, from the classic malloc implementations to modern arena allocators, jemalloc, tcmalloc, and custom allocators that power high-performance systems.
Reverse Indexing and Inverted Files: How Search Engines Fly
2023-07-19Tokenization, postings lists, skip pointers, and WAND: a tour of the data structures that make full‑text search fast.
Blockchain Consensus: Nakamoto Consensus, Casper FFG, Tendermint BFT, and the Safety-Liveness Tradeoff
2023-07-02A 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
2023-04-06An 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
2023-04-06A 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
2023-04-04A 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
2023-03-31An 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.
Latency-Aware Edge Inference Platforms: Engineering Consistent AI Experiences
2023-03-12A full-stack guide to designing, deploying, and operating low-latency edge inference systems that stay predictable under real-world constraints.
Format-Preserving Encryption: The FFX Mode, Rank-Encipher-Unrank, and Legacy Database Protection
2023-02-25A 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.
Keeping the Model Awake: Building a Self-Healing ML Inference Platform
2023-02-14A field report on taming production machine learning inference with proactive healing, adaptive scaling, and human empathy.
TCP Congestion Control: From Slow Start to BBR
2023-02-11A comprehensive exploration of TCP congestion control algorithms, from classic approaches like Tahoe and Reno to modern innovations like BBR. Learn how these algorithms balance throughput, fairness, and latency across diverse network conditions.
Floating Point: How Computers Represent Real Numbers
2023-02-08A deep exploration of IEEE 754 floating point representation, the mathematics behind binary fractions, precision limits, and the subtle bugs that can arise when working with real numbers in code.
Threshold Cryptography: Distributed Key Generation, Threshold ECDSA, and the Validator Use Case
2023-02-03A 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
2023-01-21An 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
2023-01-10A 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
2022-12-26A 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.
Garbage Collection Algorithms: From Mark-and-Sweep to ZGC
2022-11-22A comprehensive exploration of garbage collection algorithms, from classic mark-and-sweep to modern concurrent collectors like G1, Shenandoah, and ZGC. Learn how automatic memory management works and the trade-offs that shape collector design.