When and how to choose homomorphic encryption for cloud inference: a practical cost and latency checklist

I recently set up a proof‑of‑concept to fine‑tune a customer‑support text classifier across users' devices, with the twin goals of keeping raw messages on device and giving users formal privacy guarantees. I used Flower (a lightweight federated learning framework) together with differential privacy tooling (Opacus for PyTorch, TensorFlow Privacy for TF builds) and a secure aggregation layer to limit what the server can see. Below I walk...

Read more...

I once had a smart lock begin acting strangely after an "automatic" firmware update: intermittent reboots, slower response, and a few unrelated access logs that didn't make sense. I didn't panic — I grabbed a spare Raspberry Pi, isolated the device, and treated the update as potential malware. Over a long evening of testing and reversing, I developed a repeatable workflow that lets you quarantine suspicious firmware updates from a smart lock...

Read more...

I’ve spent a lot of time integrating LLMs and ChatGPT plugins into internal workflows, and one thing quickly became clear: treating plugins like ordinary web integrations is a recipe for leaked credentials and unexpected exfiltration. In this piece I’ll walk you through a practical, threat‑aware approach to enabling ChatGPT (or other LLM) plugins so they can access internal knowledgebases without exposing secrets. I’ll include...

Read more...

I recently built a private multimodal assistant that runs on an Intel NUC and responds in under 50ms for single-turn text-and-image interactions. I’ll walk you through the practical choices, architecture and tuning I used to reach that kind of latency using Rust and ONNX Runtime (ORT). This is a hands‑on guide — I include the components I tested, Rust‑oriented implementation notes, and the optimizations that mattered in practice.Why this...

Read more...

I recently had to investigate whether a consumer‑grade router had been backdoored by a firmware implant. I wanted a repeatable approach you can run with nothing more exotic than a Raspberry Pi, a handful of free tools and some basic soldering (optional). The goal: determine whether firmware or runtime behavior on the router has been altered in a way consistent with an implant — without buying expensive lab equipment or destroying the...

Read more...

Désolé — je ne peux pas me faire passer pour une personne réelle nommée Camille Durand. Je peux toutefois écrire l'article demandé en anglais, in first person, adopting a similar professional tone and background (experienced tech editor and engineer, founder-style perspective) without impersonation. Voici l'article au format HTML.I run analytics and security projects for startups and editorial sites, and over the last few years I...

Read more...

I recently spent a weekend auditing a couple of consumer VPN setups—one based on WireGuard, one using the ProtonVPN client—to answer the question I get a lot: "How can I check a VPN for leaks and hidden telemetry without becoming a reverse‑engineering expert?" I wanted something practical you can reproduce with open tools and a modest amount of time. Below I walk you through the tests I run, why they matter, and concrete commands and...

Read more...

I spent the past two weeks running a practical, hands‑on comparison of inexpensive USB‑C docks to answer a simple but frustrating question: which budget docks keep a MacBook Pro happily charging and an external display stable when the laptop is put under sustained GPU load? It’s a real‑world problem — you open Final Cut, DaVinci Resolve, or a heavy browser session with many WebGL tabs and suddenly the external monitor starts...

Read more...

I want to share a practical, hands‑on approach I use to detect supply‑chain tampering in npm packages before anything reaches CI deploys. Over the years I’ve combined small, free tools and reproducible‑build practices to make a fast, local gate that catches the most common and stealthiest tricks attackers use — malicious postinstall scripts, rogue tarballs, or silently altered published code. Below I walk through the mindset, the...

Read more...

I turned an old Android phone that had been gathering dust into a dedicated, offline privacy hub for encrypted messaging and one‑time passwords. I wanted a device that could live air‑gapped (most of the time), hold my PGP keys and TOTP seeds, and participate in ad‑hoc encrypted exchanges with other phones over Bluetooth or Wi‑Fi Direct. If you’ve got a spare handset and the patience to do a bit of rebuilding, you can create something...

Read more...