Wandering Thoughts archives

Link: Peter Gutmann on PKI

Everything you never wanted to know about PKI but were forced to find out [PDF] by Peter Gutmann is a set of slides about just that: a pile of the warts and issues with PKI in general and the SSL model in specific. If you're interested in the whole field, his home page has links to enough additional papers to keep you reading for some time.

(From Chris Samuel, and that in turn from Russell Coker.)

Link: Threads Cannot be Implemented as a Library

I've already linked to this in passing, but I'm going to rerun it as an explicit link. Threads Cannot be Implemented as a Library by Hans Boehm makes the argument in its title:

We provide specific arguments that a pure library approach, in which the compiler is designed independently of threading issues, cannot guarantee correctness of the resulting code.

There is also a discussion of this paper at Lambda the Ultimate that may be interesting reading. On a quick skim of the LtU discussion thread, this Usenet article jumps out as a useful summary of the entire volatile and multiprocessor programming issue, ending up with the conclusion that using volatile is both unnecessary and harmful in shared-state concurrent programming.