Another day, another urgent pronouncement on the need to transition to post-quantum cryptography ASAP: this one from the White House, in the form of an Executive Order requiring certain “high value” systems to transition to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) by the end of 2030 (for key exchange) or 2031 (for signatures). This brings forward the date […]

This should be old news, but I keep seeing the same mistake crop up, so I thought I’d blog about it and spread awareness. In Java, if you want to configure TLS you generally start with an SSLContext. And you get an instance of this class by calling the static method SSLContext.getInstance("TLSv1.3"), specifying the version […]

I’m sure by now you’ve all read the news about Anthropic’s new “Mythos” model and its apparently “dangerous” capabilities in finding security vulnerabilities. I’m sure everyone reading this also has opinions about that. Well, here are a few of mine. Is it all just hype? Firstly, it’s tempting to dismiss the announcement as pure marketing […]

I originally posted this on Mastodon, but I thought I’d add it here too: “What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted […]

There’s a common misconception among developers that my job, as a (application) Security Engineer, is to just search for security bugs in their code. They may well have seen junior security engineers doing this kind of thing. But, although this can be useful (and is part of the job), it’s not what I focus on […]