Geai sur fond blanc, et sur une branche

In my first article on the PPPP protocol I said:

“Even if the encryption key weren’t easily extracted, it is mashed into four bytes which become the effective key. So there are merely four billion possible keys.”

I am now doing a more thorough analysis of the way keys are being mapped to effective keys. And I was very wrong, I’m already down to only ~1.1 million possible effective keys. 🤦‍♂️

Edit: Now down to half that number: ~570k possible keys. Judging by my experiments this is getting close to the real number, though there are still some more restrictions to these keys to be considered.

(I’m trying to see whether https://github.com/pmarrapese/iot/blob/master/p2p/lansearch/lansearch.py can be made to deal with “encrypted” PPPP communication without knowing the key being used.)

NIST tried to pull the pin on NTP servers after blackout caused atomic clock drift https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/21/nist_ntp_outage_warning/

all these stupid VPN ads act like TLS has never existed

Be weird. Be colorful. Help random people. 💕