Introducing the Dayada Encoding

2023-12-01 5 min read Programming Marco

Imagine you need to transfer small chunks of binary data over a channel that doesn’t like binary of any kind. You want to disguise it as regular text, maybe in a language the text processor/forwarder cannot analyze. That’s exactly what the Dayada encoding does. Continue reading

Threshold Chunking

2021-02-05 15 min read Programming Marco

The Problem

How do you distribute a file in pieces such that you need exactly a given number of the pieces to rebuild the entire file?

This article was inspired by the Shamir Secret Sharing Scheme (SSSS), a cryptographic scheme (process) by which a secret key is shared between $n$ fragments, any $m$ of which can be used to recreate the entire key (n and $m$ being determined at the beginning of the process). Recreating the key from fragments is automatic and requires no further password or other. If you can find $m$ fragments and know which index they each have, you can recreate the key in its entirety.

SSL Certificates with Let's Encrypt

2016-10-21 6 min read Howto Marco

You probably noticed a microscopic difference when accessing the site: suddenly, when you type in mrgazz.com, you get redirected to the secure site, <>. Why, and how?

First the why: Google announced it was going to prioritize search results according to the security of the site. That makes a lot of sense: “secure” sites have a modicum of respectability and require extra work compared to plain HTTP sites. You have to set up a secure server, which means you have to do more than simply point a DNS name to an IP address.