Polynonce: A Tale of a Novel ECDSA Attack and Bitcoin Tears

Write a First Person Game in 2KB With Rust

Rebuilding Loggi’s Design System on top of Material UI

Issue #342

3/7/2023

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Hey-ya
Glad that a number of you enjoyed the AI article/book yesterday. It highlighted one of my biggest concerns with using chatgpt/copilot/any other "assistant" model, which is the fact that they're really bad at failing. In the article, the author highlights how they can fail dramatically, by spewing nonsense that is instantly obvious. Although that's bad, I don't think it's as bad as when they produce results that look correct but are actually absolutely wrong. Basically a false positive. Those are way harder to catch and I'm not really sure how you'd prevent them without manual intervention.
Unrelated, Prague is a pretty awesome city. Would recommend.
Anyway, here's the issue.

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Polynonce: A Tale of a Novel ECDSA Attack and Bitcoin Tears

Published: 6 March 2023
Tags: encryption, infosec


In this blog post, the Nils Amiet tells a tale of how they discovered a novel attack against ECDSA, how they applied it to datasets they found in the wild, including the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks, and how they found evidence that someone had previously attacked vulnerable wallets with a different exploit and drained them.
Some highlights:

  • "the attack looks at the fact that you can always define a recurrence relation among nonces used in different ECDSA signatures as a polynomial of arbitrarily high degree, with unknown coefficients, modulo the order of the curve’s generator point"
  • Basically means whenever an ECSDA signature is generated, it gives a relation between nonce and the private key
  • It's an issue because nonces are usually generated using weak pesudo-random number generators (PRNG)


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Write a First Person Game in 2KB With Rust

Published: 24 February 2023
Tags: games, graphics, rust


Grant Handy explains how to create a first person game without an engine or a graphics API using ray casting with Rust.
Some highlights:

  • Ray casting is an algorithm that projects a 2D game into a 3D perspective
  • Such a game is drastically limited in terms of movement and map design
  • Still cool though


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Rebuilding Loggi’s Design System on top of Material UI

Published: 21 October 2022
Tags: css, design patterns, html, philosophy, web


Gustavo de Paula describes how his company switched to using Material UI for their frontend, what a design system is and why it is useful.
Some highlights:

  • "A design system is a set of consistent principles and rules that guide the creation of user experiences inside a product"
  • Design systems are useful because they reduce the overhead required to think about how something has to be done, while also allowing for re-usability
  • Interesting elaboration on how (and how not) the switch was a success for the company


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How did I do?

* Amazing
* Articles not relevant to me
* Articles were relevant, but badly written
* Summaries told me everything I wanted to know
* I like turtles

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Stats (updated daily)

Sent: 3053

Opens: 1408

Clicks: 264

Link Clicks Clicks % Unique Clicks Unique Clicks %
Polynonce: A Tale of a Novel ECDSA Attack and Bitcoin Tears 29 14.65% 30 14.02
Write a First Person Game in 2KB With Rust 103 52.02% 110 51.40
Rebuilding Loggi’s Design System on top of Material UI 66 33.33% 74 34.58

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