The Fragility of Raw RSA: From Mathematical Elegance to Existential Forgery
Why textbook RSA preserves multiplicative structure and enables existential forgery, and how hash-then-sign and padding schemes like RSA-PSS close the gap.
Texas Tech University · CS Graduate Program
Notes from a working CS graduate program.
Long-form writing on cryptography, formal verification, and machine learning, plus a running archive of coursework and side projects.
Recent writing
The Architecture of Trust: A Comparative Analysis of Group Structures in Cryptography
How Lagrange and Cauchy shape real-world DH and ECC groups, why nearly-prime cofactor curves trade purity for performance, and what Secure Scuttlebutt teaches about validation.
The Hidden Geometry of Trust: Subgroups, Cofactors, and Scalar Efficiency in ECC
From Weierstrass curves and double-and-add to cofactor attacks and Dual_EC_DRBG—how subgroup geometry and implementation choices determine ECC trust boundaries.
Vulnerability Assessment Report: Nonce Leakage and Implementation Risks in (EC)DSA
A structured look at HNP-based key recovery, BIGNUM representation leaks, lazy resizing CVEs, and protocol-level subgroup failures in modern signature stacks.
Engineering Protocol-Secure and Side-Channel Resistant Cryptography: From Theory to Implementation
Bridging prime-order proofs with cofactor reality: small-subgroup attacks, BIGNUM leaks, twist security, and a practical mitigation checklist for protocol engineers.
The Great Cryptographic Shift: From Classical Diffie-Hellman to Elliptic Curves
Why finite-field DLP hits a scalability wall, how ECC and Pollard rho change the cost curve, and a worked finite-field point arithmetic example on F23.
Cracking the Code: A Review of Cryptographic Failures in Peer-to-Peer and Wireless Protocols
From Tamarin’s prime-order ideal to Scuttlebutt, Bluetooth P-256 invalid-point attacks, and OpenSSL lazy resize—how symbolic proofs miss implementation and protocol reality.
The Perfection Paradox: Why the World's Only Unbreakable Code is a Logistical Nightmare
Discover the only mathematically unbreakable encryption method—and why its perfection makes it practically useless.
This semester
Cryptography
Advanced study of cryptographic systems, security protocols, and modern encryption techniques including symmetric/asymmetric encryption, hash functions, digital signatures, and public key cryptography.
Software Verification and Validation
Methods and techniques for verifying and validating software systems, including testing strategies, formal methods, model checking, specification analysis, and continuous verification.
General
General posts, updates, and content not specific to a particular course.
Selected projects
Reinforcement Learning Video Notes
Kaggle Competition Playbook
A comprehensive collection of Kaggle competition solutions featuring reusable Python notebooks, feature engineering patterns, cross-valid...
Master's Theorem Visual Guide
Colophon
A working notebook — half draft, half archive. The site indexes coursework, project write-ups, and longer pieces on cryptography and verification. Source on GitHub.