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Neil Madden

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Are we any closer to the Quantum Apocalypse? Another day, another urgent pronouncement on the need to transition to post-quantum cryptography...
2nd Jul 2026
1

Are we any closer to the Quantum Apocalypse?

from Neil Madden [alt+shift+b] in technology

2nd Jul 2026
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...
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Java’s SSLContext protocol name is a footgun This should be old news, but I keep seeing the same mistake crop up, so I thought I’d blog about it...
23rd Jun 2026
1

Java’s SSLContext protocol name is a footgun

from Neil Madden [alt+shift+b] in technology

23rd Jun 2026
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...
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Mythos and its impact on security I’m sure by now you’ve all read the news about Anthropic’s new “Mythos” model and its apparently...
14th Apr 2026
1

Mythos and its impact on security

from Neil Madden [alt+shift+b] in technology

14th Apr 2026
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,...
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Why I don’t use LLMs for programming I originally posted this on Mastodon, but I thought I’d add it here too: “What I mean is that if you...
2nd Mar 2026
1

Why I don’t use LLMs for programming

from Neil Madden [alt+shift+b] in technology

2nd Mar 2026
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 […]
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Looking for vulnerabilities is the last thing I do There’s a common misconception among developers that my job, as a (application) Security Engineer,...
20th Feb 2026
1

Looking for vulnerabilities is the last thing I do

from Neil Madden [alt+shift+b] in technology

20th Feb 2026
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...
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Fluent Visitors: revisiting a classic design pattern It’s been a while since I’ve written a pure programming post. I was recently implementing a...
4th Nov 2025
1

Fluent Visitors: revisiting a classic design pattern

from Neil Madden [alt+shift+b] in technology

4th Nov 2025
It’s been a while since I’ve written a pure programming post. I was recently implementing a specialist collection class that contained items of a number of different types. I needed to be able to iterate over the collection performing different actions depending on the specific...
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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...
12th Sep 2025
1

Rating 26 years of Java changes

from Neil Madden [alt+shift+b] in technology

12th Sep 2025
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 was a massive release—I remember engineers at the time grumbling that the...
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Streaming public key authenticated encryption with insider auth security Note: this post will probably only really make sense to cryptography geeks. In “When a KEM is...
2nd Jul 2025
1

Streaming public key authenticated encryption with insider auth security

from Neil Madden [alt+shift+b] in technology

2nd Jul 2025
Note: this post will probably only really make sense to cryptography geeks. In “When a KEM is not enough”, I described how to construct multi-recipient (public key) authenticated encryption. A naïve approach to this is vulnerable to insider forgeries: any recipient can construct...
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A look at CloudFlare’s AI-coded OAuth library I decided today to take a look at CloudFlare’s new OAuth provider library, which they apparently...
6th Jun 2025
1

A look at CloudFlare’s AI-coded OAuth library

from Neil Madden [alt+shift+b] in technology

6th Jun 2025
I decided today to take a look at CloudFlare’s new OAuth provider library, which they apparently coded almost entirely with Anthropic’s Claude LLM: This library (including the schema documentation) was largely written with the help of Claude, the AI model by Anthropic. Claude’s...
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The square roots of all evil Every programmer knows Donald Knuth’s famous quote that “premature optimization is the root of all...
3rd Dec 2024
57

The square roots of all evil

from Neil Madden [alt+shift+b] in technology

3rd Dec 2024
Every programmer knows Donald Knuth’s famous quote that “premature optimization is the root of all evil”, from his 1974 Turing Award lecture (pdf). A fuller quotation of the surrounding context gives a rounder view: I am sorry to say that many people nowadays are condemning...
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