RSA keys, Cryptopals, and oidc-provider

How to load RSA keys in .NET, breaking AES-ECB, fun with oidc-provider, and AI generated Lemurs.

How to create and load RSA keys in .NET

My latest article is a cheat sheet for creating your own RSA key in .NET and loading existing ones from JSON Web Keys, PEM files, and X.509 certificates.

Other new articles

Since my last newsletter, I also released my usual “Year in Review” article for 2022 (with maybe too many pictures of my son) and my latest C# solutions for the Cryptopals challenges. It only took me four years, but I finally got past challenge set one 🎉.

I’ve also updated two old and very out-of-date articles, one for Entity Framework Core and one for the nodejs OpenID provider, simply called openid-provider. I really enjoyed playing around with openid-provider and seeing its implementation of the various new and still in-draft OAuth standards.

It was also great to see my Leadership article get some traffic from a few leadership blogs. I have a few other leadership articles planned, but they will still use the book notes format for now. Still, it’s good to see people enjoying my personal anecdotes about the various bad managers I’ve experienced and the mistakes I’ve made. Maybe there’s a good conference talk in there!

AI-generated Lemurs

Recently, I’ve been messing about with OpenAIs DALL-E to spice up some internal slide decks. Since I manage Team Lemur at ClearBank, they are obviously Lemur-themed. Some turn out great; others are abominations I would rather not expose you to. I sometimes feel like a high school teacher trying to be hip, but it helps make sprint reviews a little less tedious.

Other random thoughts

I’ve pretty much moved away from social media recently. I still check Mastodon occasionally, but otherwise, I apologize for the radio silence. Recently, I did follow a Scott Hanselman’s blog post adding WebFinger discovery for Mastodon. So, if you search by scott@scottbrady91.com there, you should get a link to my hachyderm.io profile.

I tried to do some microblogging in January, but that didn’t really turn out well. It looks like my site will stick to its long-form article format for now.

I’m still considering a migration to scottbrady.io. I liked the idea of scottbrady.dev, but apparently, that is unavailable ☹️.

Till next time!