Top all-time · #1171
Neil Madden
Personal blog · neilmadden.blog · on HN as nmaddensecurityprogrammingphilosophy
Neil Madden's personal blog at neilmadden.blog covers security, programming and philosophy. Since 2019, 58 different Hacker News readers have linked it 86 times, most often “A few comments on ‘age’”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (27) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Neil Madden's blog for applied cryptography and security writing, including age encryption, Curve25519 clamping, PBKDF2 iterations and HTTP caching.
- Recommended for · 5 comments
- Called 'better' than another linked article, asking 'the right questions', and a flowchart used 'too many times'.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 27 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Thoughts on application security, applied crypto, philosophy and logic
Most-linked posts?
- A few comments on ‘age’7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2019-12-30
- Psychic Signatures in Java5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2022-04-19
- Rating 26 years of Java changes5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-09-13
- A look at Cloudflare's AI-coded OAuth library4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-06-08
- Why the OAuth mTLS spec is more interesting than you might think3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-01-20
- On PBKDF2 Iterations3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-01-09
- Are we overthinking post-quantum cryptography?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-06-20
- Hybrid encryption and the KEM/DEM paradigm3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-01-06
- What’s the Curve25519 clamping all about?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-12-17
- Galois/Counter Mode and random nonces3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-05-28
What Hacker News says?
It’s not so much that they’re neither true nor false (they’re not paradoxes), but that they can be true in some interpretations and false in others. I wrote up some notes about this here: https://neilmadden.blog/2020/11/17/some-incomplete-thoughts-...
Comment linking /2020/11/17/some-incomplete-thoughts-about-godel/
on “What Gödel Discovered”Submitted Psychic Signatures in Java as a story · 309 points
HN discussionYour estimation maybe right, but maybe also there is a point on why it is right: https://neilmadden.blog/2025/06/06/a-look-at-cloudflares-ai-... Maybe because (and I'm quoting that article) it is still lacking in what it should have that you managed to accomplish this task in "few days" instead of "a few weeks, maybe months". Maybe the bottleneck was not your typing speed, but the [specific knowledge] to build that…
Comment linking /2025/06/06/a-look-at-cloudflares-ai-coded-oauth-library/
on “Cloudlflare builds OAuth with Claude and publishes all the prompts”Submitted Moving Away from UUIDs (2018) as a story · 279 points
HN discussionFirst: Valid point about the image size. A possible sign for bloat? Bloat is danger. Second: C, C++ or Rust are our tools. Everyone prefers another for technical and personal reasons. A religious believe in salvation by the next programming language is not helpful and causing harm. I hope sanitizers for C/C++ improve further - which improved safety a lot. For C++28 or C++3x we can hope for further safety improvement…
Comment linking /2022/04/19/psychic-signatures-in-java/
on “Global hack on Microsoft Sharepoint hits U.S., state agencies, researchers say”Submitted Digital signatures and how to avoid them as a story · 278 points
HN discussionYep. And tooling to secure C improved a lot in recent years. The Address-Sanitizer is a big improvement. I’m looking forward that C++ improves as language itself because it was already improved (smart-pointers, RAII, a lot of edge cases regarding sequencing) and they seem to be willing to modify the actual language. This opens a path for project to migrate from C to C++. A language inherits a lot from its introducti…
Comment linking /2022/04/19/psychic-signatures-in-java/
on “Maestro: A Linux-compatible kernel in Rust”Submitted A look at Cloudflare's AI-coded OAuth library as a story · 271 points
HN discussioncalling this format "secure" is not sufficient, here is a review that asked the right questions. https://neilmadden.blog/2019/12/30/a-few-comments-on-age/ Unfortunately, the age spec doesn’t document its threat model or the security goals it is intended to achieve so I’m having to read between the lines to work out what was intended.
Comment linking /2019/12/30/a-few-comments-on-age/
on “Show HN: Age 1.0 – Simple, modern and secure file encryption”Submitted Rating 26 years of Java changes as a story · 235 points
HN discussionI wrote up some more detailed notes here: https://neilmadden.blog/2019/12/30/a-few-comments-on-age/
Comment linking /2019/12/30/a-few-comments-on-age/
on “Age: A simple, modern and secure file encryption tool”Submitted Java sealed classes and exhaustive pattern matching as a story · 189 points
HN discussionIt's the other way around. NIST P curves don't require any special preparation to their private key. Curve25519 on the other hand requires a bizarre "clamping" ( https://neilmadden.blog/2020/05/28/whats-the-curve25519-clam... ), partially because the curve has cofactor 8. Apart from clamping not being fully and clearly justified in most of the earliest specs and papers (which led to a few broken and/or insecure impl…
Comment linking /2020/05/28/whats-the-curve25519-clamping-all-about
on “Let's Encrypt's New Root and Intermediate Certificates”Submitted Parse, don’t type-check as a story · 178 points
HN discussion> It costs: Not wrong, but given these algorithms are mostly used at setup, how much cost is actually being occurred compared to the entire session? Certainly if your sessions are short-lived then the 'overhead' of PQC/hybrid is higher, but I'd be curious to know the actually byte and energy costs over and above non-PQC/hybrid, i.e., how many bytes/joules for a non-PQC exchange and how many more by adding PQC. E.g.…
Comment linking /2025/06/20/are-we-overthinking-post-quantum-cryptography/
on “OpenSSH Post-Quantum Cryptography”Submitted A few comments on ‘age’ as a story · 77 points
HN discussionI wrote about putting secrets in URLs a few years ago: https://neilmadden.blog/2019/01/16/can-you-ever-safely-inclu...
Comment linking /2019/01/16/can-you-ever-safely-include-credentials-in-a-url/
on “You cannot simply publicly access private secure links, can you?”Submitted Is Datalog a good language for authorization? as a story · 68 points
HN discussionIndeed, modern ML has been a validation of (some of) GOFAI: https://neilmadden.blog/2024/06/30/machine-learning-and-the-...
Comment linking /2024/06/30/machine-learning-and-the-triumph-of-gofai/
on “Use Prolog to improve LLM's reasoning”Submitted Galois/Counter Mode and random nonces as a story · 66 points
HN discussionhttps://neilmadden.blog/2025/06/06/a-look-at-cloudflares-ai-...
Comment linking /2025/06/06/a-look-at-cloudflares-ai-coded-oauth-library
on “Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking”Submitted The square roots of all evil as a story · 62 points
HN discussionThe way DH is used typically for encryption (ECIES) or in TLS doesn’t give you authentication. But you can get authentication from DH alone, without PSK or PKI. See https://neilmadden.blog/2021/04/08/from-kems-to-protocols/ for some details on the security properties of various types of DH.
Comment linking /2021/04/08/from-kems-to-protocols/
on “Digital signatures and how to avoid them”Submitted Rating 26 years of Java changes as a story · 7 points
HN discussionI'm no cryptographer, but I would say that it is indeed the case that you can assume that two parties can derive a shared key over an untrusted channel. The post Cryptography Right Answers PQ [1], linked in another comment, addresses this in the section "Key Exchange". Rather than thinking about Diffie-Hellman directly, you would turn to a Key Exchange Mechanism (KEM). Before post-quantum cryptography concerns, KEM…
Comment linking /2021/01/22/hybrid-encryption-and-the-kem-dem-paradigm/
on “Digital signatures and how to avoid them”Submitted Rating 26 years of Java changes as a story · 5 points
HN discussion> I have recently written security-sensitive code using Opus 4. I of course reviewed every line and made lots of both manual and prompt-based revisions. > Cloudflare apparently did something similar recently. Sure, LLMs don't magically remove your ability to audit code. But the way they're currently being used, do they make the average dev more or less likely to introduce vulnerabilities? By the way, a cursory look…
Comment linking /2025/06/06/a-look-at-cloudflares-ai-coded-oauth-library/
on “LLMs and coding agents are a security nightmare”Submitted Rating 26 years of Java changes as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI like it, because it is indeed nice to have a NIST-backed construction. But at the same time, it is disappointing that you get locked out of several niceties of NIST KDFs, such as label and context. I get that they are sacrificed to minimize the number of AES calls, but still I would prioritize strong cryptographic separation over just a few saved AES calls, especially for messages longer than a few hundred bytes.…
Comment linking /2024/05/23/galois-counter-mode-and-random-nonces/
on “The XAES-256-GCM extended-nonce AEAD”Submitted What’s the Curve25519 clamping all about? as a story · 5 points
HN discussion
