lockdown browser reverse engineered

This analysis was the culmination of a ~6 month journey. It is unfortunate, that the software considered the “gold standard” for remote proctored exams is in the current state it is. This post was motivated purely for informational purposes and I do not condone any of the following contents. This

A plain english introduction to CAP Theorem

CAP Theorem explained You’ll often hear about the CAP theorem which specifies some kind of an upper limit when designing distributed systems. As with most of my other introduction tutorials, lets try understanding CAP by comparing it with a real world situation. Chapter 1: “Remembrance Inc” Your new venture

Fault tolerant distributed system failure; real world example and mitigation

Starting October 28th and fully resolving on October 31st, Roblox experienced a 73-hour outage.¹ Fifty million players regularly use Roblox every day and, to create the experience our players expect, our scale involves hundreds of internal online services. As with any large-scale service, we have service interruptions from time to

systemd, 10 years later: a historical and technical retrospective

10 years ago, systemd was announced and swiftly rose to become one of the most persistently controversial and polarizing pieces of software in recent history, and especially in the GNU/Linux world. The quality and nature of debate has not improved in the least from the major flame wars around

Visualizing Bayes Theorem

I recently came up with what I think is an intuitive way to explain Bayes’ Theorem. I searched in google for a while and could not find any article that explains it in this particular way. Of course there’s the wikipedia page, that long article by Yudkowsky, and a

JWST sequential ranging

I decoded a recording I made with the Allen Telescope Array. I used an IQ sample rate of 3.84 Msps when doing this recording because I wanted to see if there were any ranging signals. Usually, ranging signals have a bandwidth of 1.5 MHz or less in baseband,

How a Single Line of Code Made a 24-core Server Slower Than a Laptop

Imagine that you wrote a program for a problem that is very easy to solve. Each thread does its own piece of work, and the threads don’t have to work together except to combine their results at the end. The more cores it runs on, the faster it is.

From TensorFlow and PyTorch to Jax and Julia: Engineering Trade-Offs in Automatic Differentiation

In order to understand the differences between automatic differentiation libraries, let’s talk about the trade-offs that were made by the people who made them. I would say that none of these libraries are better than the other. They all make engineering decisions based on the domains and use cases

An introduction to Ghidra's primary components

When you start using a new reverse engineering platform for the first time, it can be hard to get used to it. It’s too much information. I don’t know what I should be looking at. A window is a place where you can look out and see what

Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection (FCOS)

Hello there. I took a break from my Internet activity but here I am again. In this piece, I am writing about Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection (FCOS), which was published after YOLOv3 but before YOLOv4. Therefore, I feel like it is important to look at it first. Also, I

MEV on Eth 2.0: Flashbots, Snipers, and Stolen NFTs

Let us first define the acronyms states above: * MEV stands for “Miner Extractable Value” or “Maximal Extractable Value.” It refers to the extraction of value from Ethereum users by reordering, inserting, and censoring transactions within blocks. * Flashbots is an enhancement to the Ethereum protocol that adds a network layer for

Apple's Secure Enclave Processor (SEP): an indepth overview and mechanism

Introduction Apple designed the iOS platform with security at its core. When we set out to create the best possible mobile OS, we drew from decades of experience to build an entirely new architecture. We thought about the security hazards of the desktop environment, and established a new approach to