[Links of the Day] 16/10/2018 : Cryptographic Library by Google, Rust CVS toolkit, Riselab Fast K/V store

• Tink : cryptographic software library by Google offering a multi-language, cross-platform cryptographic solution. [Github]
• xsv : A fast CSV command line toolkit written in Rust.
• Anna: from the AMPlab now RiseLab which brought you the ramcloud project and tons of other goodies such as the raft consensus protocol, Spark or Mesos, comes Anna a fast KV store. This project is really interesting because the folks at RiseLab are really doing advance applied research. Their result are also impressive as well as business grounded. By example, the K/V store provides 8x the throughput of AWS ElastiCache’s and 355x the throughput of DynamoDB which is already impressive. But it is even more when you realised that the comparison is made for a fixed price point.

[Links of the Day] 15/02/2018 : #a16z crypto readings, Unlocking network embedding black box, Pouch - Alibaba's OCI implementation

• The Crypto Canon : a16z crypto readings resources. Really well organised and will bring you up to speed at a gradual pace. It covers a wide range of topics from foundations (& history); and key concepts and beginners’ guides — followed by specific topics such as governance; development, privacy, and security; scaling; consensus; cryptoeconomics and investing; fundraising and token distribution; decentralized exchanges; stablecoins; and cryptoeconomic primitives (crytocollectibles, curation markets, games & culture).
• Unlocking the black box of network embedding : this can have a huge impact on network graph embedding ( word2vec , skipgraph , etc..). The authors claim that they can provide a theoretical explanation of popular methods used to automatically map the structure and characteristics of networks
• Pouch : container technology open-source project created by Alibaba Group. Basically the 3000 pounds Asian gorilla decided to push Open container initiative and help make container tech a commodity. It's interesting that we are seeing history repeat itself in the container domain the same way it happened, to some extent, with the virtualization stack. 

[Links of the Day] 21/07/2017 : Tofu HPC interconnect challenges, Satellite Quantum key distribution, Go K/V store

• Evolution and challenges of Tofu Interconnect : Deep learning and heterogeneous hardware is putting a strain on HPC interconnect. They need to adapt to new application communication model as well as hardware while retaining best of breed capability for "traditional" HPC application. 
• Satellite-to-ground quantum key distribution : this is ground breaking from Chinese scientists. Where they demonstrate they are able to solve the main hurdle behind planet-wide quantum communication by leveraging satellite to satellite quantum crypto key distribution.  And they are deploying a proof of concept!
• Badger :  nice key/value store written in go. It's based on Wiskey paper and is heavily optimised for SSD. It's 3.5 faster than rocksDB .[github]

[Links of the Day] 14/06/2017 : Formally proven HTTPS replacement, Kisrhombille geometry public key cryptosystem using Mersenne Numbers

Everest: Towards a Verified, Drop-in Replacement of HTTPS. The authors ( team of Microsoft, MIT, INRIA) propose a complete, verified replacement of  TLS and other components of HTTPS. Entirely written in F* for provability, Everest is then compiled into a low-level language. This is a highly praiseworthy solution. However, there is still a great portion of the dev world that do not completely embrace or understand formal verification. And until the big corporation ( Google, Microsoft, AWS, etc.. ) start pushing such library the adoption will remain marginal.
Public-Key Cryptosystem via Mersenne Numbers : an interesting new approach to delivering new Public key cryptosystem, for crypto buff only.
Kisrhombille geometry : tessellation of plane using rhombic faces divided in a centre point into four triangles. While Voronoi tesselation tend to still have my preference this type of tessellation has a high potential and like all of them, they are really pretty :) 

[Links of the day] 05/02/2016: Cloudlet server image, Shmoocon 2016, Multidimensional queries

• Multidimensional Access Methods : 1996 paper showing how hard it is to resolve multidimensional queries . List the state of the art approach which are still relevant to date.
• Cloudlets : I think I linked to cloudlets before, but I'll do it again jsut to remind myself to actually use them. Cloudlets are universal server images for the cloud. They're lightweight, version-controlled, and you can export them to any bootable format known to man: Xen, KVM, Amazon EC2, or just a plain bootable CD.
• Shmoocon 2016 : excellent security conference , especially check out the post quantum crypto talk by Jean-Philippe Aumasson 

Bonus : video demonstrating CISE tool for proving distributed systems correctness

[Links of the day] 18/01/2016 : Post quantum crypto, ARM virtualization, Scalable C

• Post-quantum key agreement : First, 99% of people out their do not use encryption correctly, so you should not be worried about post quantum crypto because you are not protecting yourself in the pre-quantum era. Now if you are part of the 1%, bad news you key size just jump from a couple of Kbytes to Mbytes (and maybe GB)... Very good read explaining the challenges ahead and existing gap of crypto solution in the upcoming post quantum era.
• ARM virtualization extensions : In depth look at the ARM virtualization feature. Maybe we can see a glimpse of what can be done with the AMD ARM server push. 
• Scalable C : book on how to make C scalable by the founder of ZeroMQ. Some good things, some bad one, a lot of grief toward C++. I personally love the C language but sometimes pitting one language against another doesn't help without context. Pick the tools that suits best and sometimes yes it means picking the one that makes collaboration efficient rather than make the code efficient. 

Links of the day 21/09/2015 : Encrypted DB, Curl and No/SQL

CryptDB : database system that can process SQL queries over encrypted data.
Curl Cheat Sheet : for the ones out there curling away.
How to do SQL with K/V : how to map SQL style table to a key / value store. Also know SQL in NoSQL :)

Links of the day 01/09/2015 : software FTL for SSD, Decryption , startup

• Open Channel : It seems that there is a current trend to strip most solution to their bare minimum. Open Channel is an effort to strip away the FTL layer as some estimate that Embedded FTL’s introduce significant limitations for Server compute. Basically the goal is to allow the specialization at software level for specific workload ex: 90% read, transnational , etc.. [github]
• Encrypted database case : cryptoanalysis of basic encryption using using information entropy
• How to start a startup marathon : somebody decided to watch the whole 16h straight with live commentary. To a certain extend it is a good supplement to the lecture note and a excellent way for those who didn't watch the course yet to pick what they using the commentary  to watch first using the commentary.

Links of the day 27/08/2015 : PCIe fabric, One Time SSH key and China ARM processor

• Dolphin PCIe fabric : seems that the PCIe fabric is getting a lot of news recently, nice to see that we are reaching the 300 nanoseconds latency. While greater bandwidth and lower latency is really great this bring a certain amount of challenge as DRAM access time is still around 10-30 nanoseconds. Implying that if we the CPU needs to do anything with this data it only has ~250 nanoseconds to do so before moving to the next one. I wonder when we wills start to see event based GPGPU or FPGA approach in CPU in order to handle such performance. Maybe its time to move toward stream oriented CPU architecture ? 
• One-Time SSH Keys : I like this concept, it allow the use of single-use key ready for connecting to untrusted system. With single-use keys, even if the key is compromised, it will have already been used, and would be of little use.
• China ARM : Homegrown ARM v8 based cpu chips. Seems that the Chinese are getting serious in leveraging homegrown solution in the CPU field and especially HPC. From this expertise they hope to spin off in the scale out computing (high density, low power). Maybe the ARM server breakthrough will come from the Asian market? 

Links of the day 17/08/2015 : #NVMe & #RDMA , #Strategy , Cryptography in hostile environment

• NVMe over RDMA fabric : interesting bit PMC Sierra and Mellanox unveiled NVMe ove RDMA fabric as well as peer direct technology for NVM storage. This open up a certain world of possibility where you could combine without CPU involvement GPU - NVM(e) - RDMA. Literally offloading all the storage operations.
• Strategy Scenario and the use of mapping : excellent series of posts by Simon Wardley showing how leveraging his mapping technique allow CEO - CIO to navigate the tortuous strategic decision. The Analysis of the scenario can be found here 
• The network is hostile : TL;DR: we don't encrypt enough and early enough

Links of the day 05 - 08 - 2015 : Homer Explain #SAP, awesomeness, cryptii

• Homer explain SAP : very good description of SAP and its evolution. As an ex-employee of the mastodon i would have loved to have this given to me on my first day with them.
• Get awesomeness : To retrieve all amazing awesomeness from Github
• Cryptii : convert, encode and decode content between different format systems. This happens fully in your browser using JavaScript, no content will be sent to any kind of server.

Links of the day 26 - 05 - 2015

Today's links 26/05/2015: dynamic organisational model, hardware memory de duplication, Elliptic curve #cryptography

• Hybrid Dynamic Model : modern approach to structuring an organisation's portfolio that allows for multiple ways of working to co-exist from innovation to utility work and for that work to change which processes, cultures and practices it uses over time.
• Thesis on fined grained memory de duplication : cache line and hardware solution for memory deduplication. The company that was subsequently created after the PhD was acquired by intel.
• Elliptic Curve : I always really liked elliptic curve crypto , especially what you can do with it beyond just classic encryption such as Identity based encryption. Enabling simpler and more versatile cryptography application that are really hard to deliver with classic scheme.

Links of the day 15 - 12 - 2014

Today's links  15/12/2014 : Code Monkeys, Cache Monitoring, Distributed system design and Elliptic curve crypto for Rust

• Not Just Code Monkeys : Martin Fowler keynotes on the importance of building a healthy social environment where software development can thrive.
• Intel Cache Monitoring : enables threads, applications, VMs or any combination to be tracked simultaneously in a flexible manner to suit a wide variety of software usage models. with some really nice tools and especially KVM support 
• Introduction to Distributed System Design : Google Code University distributed system lecture and notes.
• Elliptic Curve Crypto : pure rust implementation , now you can have identity based crypto solution in pure rust.

Links of the day 07 - 07- 2014

Today's links : Big data, deep learning, Cryptography, Microsoft Dev practice evolution

• TESSERA : Open Source Environment for Deep Analysis of Large Complex Data
• New algorithm shakes up #cryptography : Researchers have solved one aspect of the discrete logarithm problem 
• A Fast, Minimal Memory, Consistent Hash Algorithm :  fast, minimal memory, consistent hash algorithm in 5 lines of code! 
• How Microsoft dragged its development practices into the 21st century  : the long road to move toward an agile dev ops oriented practice at Microsoft.