The very first blog I co-founded - ETACRYPT

Marginal Ideas has been considered as the most successful blog project I have ever had up to now. However, not too many people know that it is not my only blog because I had another one a few years ago. Today, I will introduce my very first blog, ETACRYPT. It was co-founded on September 4th, 2019 by me and one of my friends, Mr. Hy Ngo.

Figure 1. ETACRYPT Homepage (Source).

As you can see in Figure 1, there has been nothing on ETACRYPT until now. LOL 🤣 Just kidding! Actually, my friend has still been writing drafts and he claims he will publish them some day, but I don’t know exactly when. Anyway, I want to talk a bit about him, the co-founder of ETACRYPT, first, and come back to the blog later. He and some other people studied cryptography with me from the early days although currently I think only I and he continue to do that while others dropped it. He was also the co-author of my undergraduate thesis. After the success of the thesis, ETACRYPT was the next collaborative project we wanted to do. At present, his work mainly relates to decentralized systems using cryptographic primitives as building blocks. To end this introduction, I show you his avatar in Figure 2. Please don’t ask me why it looks like that. It’s truly his avatar because where I took it from was his LinkedIn profile :))

Figure 2. My friend’s avatar.

Coming back to the blog, ETACRYPT was conceived on August 23rd, 2019. I cannot remember the exact reasons why we founded it, but I think there are at least two major reasons. Firstly, at the time when we planned the blog, there were several famous ones created before. The most influential one among them might be the vnhacker blog of Mr. Thai Duong, a security researcher working at Google. His blog had a lot of very good technical reports, especially posts about cryptography and its applications in practice. He has still been writing new posts, and of course, we have still been reading them regularly. The next one might be the blog of Mr. Kien Tran (aka kienmanowar), a master of reverse engineering. The amount of the knowledge he shared was so large that if you grasped a small part of it, you could be a star in any classes of computer architecture, assembly languages, or embedded systems. He has still been posting like Mr. Thai Duong, but sadly I don’t have enough capability to understand it any more. The final one might be the ThetaLog blog of Mr. Tien Le, my senior working with me for a short time. Although his blog might be not as intensive as two previous mentioned blogs, illustrations and how he presented were very impressive when comparing other mathematical and technical blogs. Overall, all three blogs inspired us to create our own blog. Secondly, as I said above, the success of the thesis motivated us to search for something great to do next. At that time, we had many ambitions, such as writing scientific papers, reading mathematical and cryptographic books and do seminars about what we read, or hosting a cryptographic group. Generally speaking, anything relevant to cryptography was accepted. Combining two reasons, we decided to make a cryptographic blog first, and then, ETACRYPT was born.

Regarding the name of the blog, inspired by the name of the conferences held by IACR like Asiacrypt or Eurocrypt, we also applied the same structure, i.e. something followed by the phrase “crypt”. Both our names started with the letter H which was accidentally similar to the uppercase form of eta, a Greek letter. Concatenating them together, we finally had the name ETACRYPT.

That is all the history of ETACRYPT. In terms of my future plan for ETACRYPT, I will definitely write something there, but not now. Maybe I will start by summarizing my future papers, or some posts here, for example. In order to close this post, I quote the slogan of ETACRYPT:

“It is insufficient to protect ourselves with laws; we need to protect ourselves with mathematics.” – Bruce Schneier