Matthew Green

I teach cryptography at Johns Hopkins. https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com (#matthew_d_green on the other site.)

About me: I teach cryptography at Johns Hopkins.

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matthew_d_green_at_ioc.exchange@momostr.pink

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Last Notes

2024-09-10 13:01:08

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I’ve been trying to think about what privacy and government access look like in this very real, imminent world. And I can’t even get a handle on it to ask reasonable technical questions. But we ought to, because it’s coming. And it’s coming fast.

2024-09-10 13:00:49

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The question is: what do governments and law enforcements do when they realize every single person has a little agent on their phone that can answer literally *any* question about their activities, in simple human language? The “crypto wars” are going to look quaint.
The temptation to legislate government access to this agent will be enormous. It’ll start with heinous crimes like child sexual abuse or terrorism, and it will appear tightly targeted. But it will be applied at massive scale, to millions of people.

2024-09-10 12:59:54

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In a very short timespan it’s going to be expected that your phone can answer questions about what you did or talked about recently, what restaurants you went to. More capability is going to drive more data access, and people will grant it.
I absolutely do believe that (at least initially), vendors will try to do this privately. The models will live on your device or, like Apple Intelligence, they’ll use some kind of secure outsourcing. It’ll be required for adoption.

2024-09-10 12:59:10

One of the things we need to discuss is that LLMs listening to your conversations and phone calls, reading your texts and emails — this is all going to be normalized and inevitable within seven years.

2024-08-07 11:29:30

Prediction markets seem to be really good at figuring out whatever widespread opinions are prevalent at any given moment, not so great at actually predicting things. Don’t know why people revere them so much.

2024-08-06 16:59:55

Dear Apple: please but the “listen to this web page” button much farther away from the “show reader mode” button please. Nothing more embarrassing than having your phone read some blog post to the whole train while you fumble with shutting it off.

2024-08-05 14:05:54

PQC is exciting because it gives research cryptographers permission to care about encryption again.

2024-08-02 00:17:52

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Here’s his last video. https://youtu.be/RWeIbJQTP2M?si=b9zwDkrY3k0lhUCo

2024-08-01 23:58:45

A good friend of mine is a guitarist for the Navy Band. He makes excellent videos on a YouTube channel but doesn’t have many subscribers. I know SEO is a terrible and dirty word but does anyone have any suggestions for (full featured) SEO services that aren’t terrible but might get him some more visibility?

2024-08-01 16:18:58

I am glad some of the “watermarking for LLMs” mania is dying down.

2024-07-21 20:50:02

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I mean, they absolutely could.

2024-07-21 20:49:44

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I’m talking about the fact that he left after one term. Passing climate legislation with a minimal majority in congress and tamping down a war in the Middle East (thus far) are pretty big too.

2024-07-21 18:06:28

Maybe one of the greatest Presidents we’ve ever had. I don’t usually do politics on social media anymore, but I have to say it.

2024-07-20 06:43:27

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Well I follow a lot of those folks and vice versa hence the question.

2024-07-20 06:41:15

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I’m confused about what you said above: that the recent Secure Element devices prevent them from brute-forcing 6-digit PINs but they’ve bypassed it by exploiting the SEP on older phones.
You don’t mean they can take a recent iPhone and somehow use an older iPhone’s hardware to brute force the more recent phone? Cause that doesn’t make sense to me. Are you just saying that they can’t break it now but maybe they can break it in a few years?

2024-07-19 20:24:31

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But I’m more interested in getting some idea from actual security experts about what value they bring. Anyone can look at a stock chart.

2024-07-19 20:21:33

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I don’t put much stock (no pun) in short term stock prices to actually reflect the real security benefits that cybersecurity companies (or electric car companies for that matter!) produce. Maybe I’m a Luddite that way.

2024-07-19 20:16:29

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iPhone 12 is a relatively ancient phone, 2020. That’s not a few months ago. I’m probably not following your whole response properly.

2024-07-19 20:13:56

I don’t really understand anything about CrowdStrike. How much value do they create? And how much of it was offset today?

2024-07-19 13:32:02

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But Crowdstrike does both local detection and major data collection and pooled analysis, right? And clearly don’t carefully test their code before major releases.

2024-07-19 13:07:48

How is the design of Crowdstrike not considered a massive security disaster to come? (Leaving aside today’s hiccup?)

2024-07-19 07:21:36

Looks like Android phones are pretty well broken by Cellebrite. https://9to5mac.com/2024/07/18/trump-shooter-android-phone-cellebrite/

2024-07-15 15:25:52

I’d been sticking Twitter out because it was a good way to reach people about encryption policy issues. But watching half my followees go full mask-off during the assassination attempt really grossed me out.

2024-06-11 13:12:49

There is definitely a correlation between amateur AI enthusiasm and never having done a damn creative thing in your life. https://www.theonion.com/guy-who-sucks-at-being-a-person-sees-huge-potential-in-1850488022

2024-06-11 11:53:59

So Apple has introduced a new system called “Private Cloud Compute” that allows your phone to offload complex (typically AI) tasks to specialized secure devices in the cloud. I’m still trying to work out what I think about this. So here’s a thread. 1/

2024-03-31 15:36:37

This thing Facebook did — running an MITM on Snapchat and other competitors’ TLS connections via their Onavo VPN — is so deeply messed up and evil that it completely changes my perspective on what that company is willing to do to its users.

2024-03-21 00:11:00

The weirdest thing about 2024 is the rapid rollout of unconstitutional age verification laws for websites, and how little the “free speech” tech crowd seems to care about this.