Photo by Florian Olivo on Unsplash This blog post walks through how to solve the SpyFi problem from the picoCTF 2018 competition. The problem involves an encrypted message that uses an AES block cipher and the objective is to exploit the weakness of the block cipher and find the secret message inside. The code was written in Julia. The SpyFi Problem Here comes the question: James Brahm, James Bond’s less-franchised cousin, has left his secure communication with HQ running, but we couldn’t find a way to steal his agent identification code. Can you? ...

Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash This blog post from May 2016 introduced a lot of skepticism about the Julia programming language. As one can see from comments on the blog page as well as recent discussions in the Julia Discourse forum, it is not without controversy. The purpose of this blog post is to debunk the myths and determine what truly be a concern…. or not. Most blogs are opinionated but I will try my best to be fair and point out differences here so people can judge according to their use cases. ...