2026-04-05
Killing the ISP Appliance: An eBPF/XDP Approach to Distributed BNG
markgascoyne.co.uk/posts/ebpf-bngAn open-source, eBPF-accelerated BNG that runs directly on OLT hardware - eliminating expensive centralised appliances
2026-01-09
Decorative Cryptography
www.dlp.rip/decorative-cryptographyLast year, I came agross a Linux kernel feature called TCG_TPM2_HMAC. It claims to detect or prevent active and passive interposer attackers.
It all sounds really great. We should care about interposer adversaries. It’s great to use the TPM features that were invented to help us with these problems.
2025-12-17
A security model for systemd
lwn.net/Articles/1042888Poettering said that he does have a vision for how all of the security-related pieces of systemd are meant to fit together. He wanted to use his talk to explain ""how the individual security-related parts of systemd actually fit together and why they exist in the first place"".
2025-08-27
Inside Windows 3
www.xtof.info/inside-windows3.htmlWindows 3 is often said to be just an UI on top of DOS. This article presents some of the inner side of Windows 3.x and will show that it is more ambitious and advanced than that.
2025-07-07
Rewriting Kafka in Rust Async: Insights and Lessons Learned in Rust | Rex Wang
wangjunfei.com/2025/06/18/Rewriting-Kafka-in-Rust-Async-Insights-and-Lessons-Learned#SummaryAchieving high-performance asynchronous Rust projects transcends mere usage of the async/await syntax; it fundamentally relies on a deep understanding of the underlying task scheduling, lock optimization, and architecture design principles.
2025-07-03
Rewriting Kafka in Rust Async: Insights and Lessons Learned in Rust | Rex Wang
wangjunfei.com/2025/06/18/Rewriting-Kafka-in-Rust-Async-Insights-and-Lessons-LearnedRex Wangs blog
2025-04-28
Nick Appleton’s blog and stuff - Building a digital filter for use in synthesisers
www.appletonaudio.com/blog/2022/building-a-digital-filter-for-use-in-synthesisersThis is a tutorial on how to build a digital implementation of a 2nd-order, continuously-variable filter (i.e. one where you can change the parameters runtime) that has dynamic behaviour that mimics an analogue filter.
2025-03-10
The power of interning: making a time series database 2000x smaller in Rust | Blog | Guillaume Endignoux
gendignoux.com/blog/2025/03/03/rust-interning-2000x.htmlIn this deep dive post, I’ll explain how I used the interning design pattern in Rust to compress this data set by a factor of two thousand! We’ll investigate how to best structure the interner itself, how to tune our data schema to work well with it, and likewise how serialization can best leverage interning.
2025-01-22
Packer: How to Build NixOS 24 Snapshot on Hetzner Cloud - Developer Friendly Blog
developer-friendly.blog/blog/2025/01/20/packer-how-to-build-nixos-24-snapshot-on-hetzner-cloudStep-by-step guide to building a NixOS 24 snapshot on Hetzner Cloud using Packer, with complete configuration files and OpenTofu deployment examples.
Building a tiny Linux from scratch
blinry.org/tiny-linuxLast week, I built a tiny Linux system from scratch, and booted it on my laptop!
2024-12-05
Optimization adventures: making a parallel Rust workload 10x faster with (or without) Rayon | Blog | Guillaume Endignoux
gendignoux.com/blog/2024/11/18/rust-rayon-optimized.htmlIn a previous post, I’ve shown how to use the rayon framework in Rust to automatically parallelize a loop computation across multiple CPU cores.
In this post, I’ll first explain which profiling tools I used to chase optimizations, before diving into how I built a faster replacement of Rayon for my use case. In the next post, I’ll describe the other optimizations that made my code much faster. Spoiler alert: copying some data sped up my code!
2024-11-22
Protecting Signal Keys on Desktop
cryptographycaffe.sandboxaq.com/posts/protecting-signal-desktop-keysThis blogpost describes our investigation and proof of concept to enhance the security of Signal Messenger key management on desktop.
2024-11-19
Using Nix to Fuzz Test a PDF Parser (Part One)
mtlynch.io/nix-fuzz-testing-1Fuzz testing is a technique for automatically uncovering bugs in software. The problem is that it’s a pain to set up. Read any fuzz testing tutorial, and the first task is an hour of building tools from source and chasing down dependencies upon dependencies.
I recently found that Nix eliminates a lot of the gruntwork from fuzz testing. I created a Nix configuration that kicks off a fuzz testing workflow with a single command.
2024-10-18
Optimizing Mandelbrot Generation with SIMD
bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2024/01/27/optimizing-mandelbrot-generation-with-simd2024-09-19
How to Build a Small Solar Power System
solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/12/how-to-build-a-small-solar-power-systemThis guide explains everything you need to know to build stand-alone photovoltaic systems that can power almost anything you want.
2024-09-10
What is the best pointer tagging method?
coredumped.dev/2024/09/09/what-is-the-best-pointer-tagging-methodIn this post, we are going to take a deep dive into pointer tagging, where metadata is encoded into a word-sized pointer. Doing so allows us to keep a compact representation that can be passed around in machine registers. This is very common in implementing dynamic programming languages, but can really be used anywhere that additional runtime information is needed about a pointer. We will look at a handful of different ways these pointers can be encoded and see how the compiler can optimize them for different hardware.
2024-09-04
the spatula
www.thespatula.io/rust/rust_io_uring_echo_serverIn this article we build off what we’ve already learned about io_uring and extend that to build an async echo server.
2024-09-02
Timeseries Indexing at Scale - Artem Krylysov
artem.krylysov.com/blog/2024/06/28/timeseries-indexing-at-scale2024-07-31
Revealing the Inner Structure of AWS Session Tokens
medium.com/@TalBeerySec/revealing-the-inner-structure-of-aws-session-tokens-a6c76469cba7TL;DR: A world first reverse engineering analysis of AWS Session Tokens. Prior to our research these tokens were a complete black box…
2024-07-28
Windows Security best practices for integrating and managing security tools | Microsoft Security Blog
www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2024/07/27/windows-security-best-practices-for-integrating-and-managing-security-toolsWe examine the recent CrowdStrike outage and provide a technical overview of the root cause.