(this is me!)

This is a homepage for me, Joshua Hill. This is a site that I use to accumulate links to items that I wrote or find interesting.

You can find out about me by reading my résumé or if you're all social media-y, you can view my or my google profile.

Papers

• A paper analyzing the security of the RADIUS authentication protocol. As an aside, this paper was stolen generously submitted for publication (after accidentally removing my name) by Peng Zhao, Xuewu Cao, and Ping Luo and published at the 2003 International Conference on Communication Technology.
• A short biography of Paul Erdős
• A defense of pure mathematics, a short biography of Georg Cantor, an introduction to his work with cardinality, and beyond.
• A Recurrence Relation for Pi
• An analysis of the "Guess 2/3 of the Average" game
• A Description of the Number Field Sieve
• Calculations involving the minimum of independent of normal distributions
• The 7-11 Problem and its Solutions
• My advancement paper Weil Image Sums (and related problems).
• Counting Value Sets: Algorithm and Complexity (with Qi Cheng and Daqing Wan)

I've translated (with help from Google Translate) Saburô Uchiyama's Sur le Nombre des Valeurs Distinctes d'un Polynôme à Coefficients dans un Corps Fini. My translation is The Number of Distinct Values of a Polynomial with Coefficients in a Finite Field

I've developed a few write ups for various classes that I've taught / TAed:

• Finite extensions of finite fields
• A quick outline of the Axiom of Choice.
• An outline of Euler's surprising series
• A proof of the divergence of the harmonic series
• Solving Cauchy-Euler equations by Substitution
• A Quick Note on Testing for Irreducibility over the Rational Numbers

I have a few papers in (sometimes perpetual) draft:

• A paper on how the constants e and i are defined, along with some applications. e, i, e, i, oh!
• ApEn Test Parameter Selection

Presentations

• A presentation that I gave in 1999 titled The Zen of Information Security.
• A presentation that I gave in 2000, titled Securing a Linux Box: It's mine, and You Can't Use It., which was in turn based on another presentation that I gave in 1998. As such, a fair bit of this is somewhat dated.
• A presentation I gave in 2002, titled Network Security: A Quick Overview.
• A presentation I gave in 2008, titled Cryptographic Foibles and Missteps.
• A presentation I gave in 2010 on Coppersmith's Theorem: Background, Generalizations and Applications.
• My advancement presentation in 2011 on Weil Image Sums.
• My ANTS X 2012 presentation on Counting Value Sets: Algorithm and Complexity
• A presentation that I gave in 2012 on Block Ciphers: Modes of Use, DES and AES
• A presentation that I gave in 2013 on Random Bit Generation: Theory and Practice

Software

Here are some programs that I find useful or generally neat:

• Solar Designer and the Openwall Project team pulled all his great tools together and made a hardened linux distribution called Owl.
• Fydor wrote a port scanner that you can use to audit your machine. It is called nmap.
• If you need to test the reasonableness of an PRNG, you can do large scale statistical testing on it. NIST has developed a series of tests documented in the excellent NIST SP800-22 (rev. 1a). NIST stopped support for the UNIX version of the test tool, but I've continued to support it here: sts.

I have a few other pieces of software that I've written over the years. Some of them are even still useful.

Hobbies

• Photography
• Motorcycling and wrenching

Elsewhere

Mail josh (dash) web (at) untruth.org with comments, questions, etc.