Astrophysicist turned advocate: guiding the globe to a safer, stronger Internet. Distinguished Technologist @internetsociety, @joebeone@techpolicy.social
- Tweets55.6K
- Following5K
- Followers7.6K
- Likes89.5K
ALT Side-by-side mockup of the front and back of a white T-shirt, with large, bold black “FRONT” and “BACK” labels above each shirt. The front has a bold question printed across the upper chest: “What does 47 zero bytes followed by a single byte containing 04 look like in Base64-encoded ASN.1 DER PEM?” Below is a block of monospaced text resembling a PEM-encoded elliptic-curve private key, beginning with “—–BEGIN EC PRIVATE KEY—–” and containing several lines of Base64, including conspicuously long runs of the letter A, before the closing delimiter. The back is almost comically sparse. It contains only three lines: —–BEGIN EC PRIVATE KEY—– 4 —–END EC PRIVATE KEY—– The design references the eMudhra certificate authority incident, in which a P-384 elliptic-curve private key had the extraordinarily predictable private scalar 4. The joke contrasts the elaborate encoding on the front with the embarrassingly simple mathematical secret on the back.
