spr-alex

The bounds where this subexponential claim kicks in is at n > 2^10^9. The information to describe such a large 3-SAT would not fit inside of a blackhole 10^1000 times the size of our whole universe. At this incredible scale, the philosophy of computational analysis might be open to loopholes that autogenerated / autoresearch is subtly exploiting instead.

That is exactly the question. I took a look and we presented some of our findings at DEF CON 34. There are paths to decrypting e2ee secrets without the passcode, some of these paths are considered vulnerabilities and have received patches (CVE-2026-28864).

"Withdrawing ADP in the UK did not affect the 14 iCloud categories that were already end-to-end encrypted by default, including iCloud Keychain and Health. ADP increases the total from 14 to 23 categories. For UK users without ADP, the additional categories (iCloud Backup, Photos, Notes, iCloud Drive and so on) revert to Standard Data Protection. ↩

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Unfortunately this first phrase is not strictly true in the sense that UK customers have their e2ee secrets exposed under common use cases, without requiring a passcode. My copresenter and I published some research at DEF CON 34 this year showing how the e2ee data is particularly vulnerable when ADP is off. Overall, people that do not work with extraction capabilities are currently over-estimating the strength of apple's e2ee and encryption in general. The platform security whitepaper documentation is insufficient on transparency and there are a number of best practices Apple is not following to better meet the e2ee claims they currently advertise.

The last 3-4 years have had tax obstacles that have motivated funded models over bootstrapped businesses:

1) the jobs act introduced a toxic R&D code from 2022-2025

2) tariffs with no reasonable means of manufacturing domestically and inhibited developing production lines with the prior tax code fiasco

These are serious security researchers and this is almost certainly a widespread vulnerability affecting mainline openwrt.

how can i upvote this twice?

this is not an ocassional bug this is still the system design today. privacy gateways upstream of big tech are the way to go on this because privacy isn't their profit center

So once again since I think I am not explaining it well, it might take a long time to go from factoring 21 to 35, and a long time from 35 to anything bigger, but from that point on the engineering has scaled up to the point that progress is very sudden. So if the canary in the coal mine is a 32-bit integer being factored, then the runway for deploying fixes is terminally short for defenders

My read of this post is that there's nuance here and that by the time we see 32-bit integers being factored then the roadmap to 256 bit integers can be counted in months on ten fingers rather than being a decade out. The underlying scaling needed to go to 32 bit requires only linear progress to get to 256

I was just very naive at 18 about program analysis. I haven't lost my imagination though. I was a self-taught IOI gold division competitor. I thought every problem had an algorithm. It doesn't work like that. Program analysis is collecting special snowflakes that melt in your hand. There is no end to the ways you can write a bug in C. Ghosts of Semmle, Semgrep, Coccinelle past, be humbled. LLMs saturate test coverage in a way no sane human would. I do not think they can catch all bugs because of the state space explosion though, but they will help all programmers get better testing. At the end of the day I believe language choice can obviate security bugs, and C/C++ is not easy or simple to secure.

I interned for the author at 18. I assumed security testing worked like this:

1. Static analysis catches nearly all bugs with near-total code coverage

2. Private tooling extends that coverage further with better static analysis and dynamic analysis, and that edge is what makes contractors valuable

3. Humans focus on design flaws and weird hardware bugs like cryptographic side-channels from electromagnetic emanations

Turns out finding all the bugs is really hard. Codebases and compiler output have exploded in complexity over 20 years which has not helped the static analysis vision. Todays mitigations are fantastic compared to then, but just this month a second 0day chain got patched on one of the best platforms for hardware mitigations.

I think LLMs get us meaningfully closer to what I thought this work already was when I was 18 and didn't know anything.