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Psychic Signatures in Java
The long-running BBC sci-fi show Doctor Who has a recurring plot device where the Doctor manages to get out of trouble by showing an identity card which is actually completely blank. Of course, thi…
Neil Madden
Thoughts on application security, applied crypto, philosophy and logic
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Software Engineering 6Security & Privacy 3Programming Languages 3Databases & Data 1AI & Machine Learning 1
2
Moving Away from UUIDs (2018)
If you need an unguessable random string (for a session cookie or access token, for example), it can be tempting to reach for a random UUID, which looks like this: 88cf3e49-e28e-4c0e-b95f-6a68a785a…
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Digital signatures and how to avoid them
Wikipedia’s definition of a digital signature is: A digital signature is a mathematical scheme for verifying the authenticity of digital messages or documents. A valid digital signature on a messag…
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Rating 26 years of Java changes
I first started programming Java at IBM back in 1999 as a Pre-University Employee. If I remember correctly, we had Java 1.1.8 installed at that time, but were moving to Java 1.2 (“Java 2”), which w…
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Java sealed classes and exhaustive pattern matching
Java 17 introduced sealed classes, which allow you to explicitly list the allowed sub-types of an interface or base class. For example, here’s a toy example using a sealed interface and records (in…
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Parse, don’t type-check
There’s a fantastic article from last year titled Parse, don’t validate. I’d highly recommend it to any programmer (along with the more recent follow up Names are not type safety). The basic idea i…