The earliest memory I have of ‘programming’ is in the early/mid 90s when my father brought home a computer from work. We could play games on it … so of course I took the spreadsheet program he used (LOTUS 123, did I date myself with that?) and tried to modify it to print out a helpful message for him. It … halfway worked? At least I could undo it so he could get back to work…

After that, I picked up programming for real in QBASIC (I still have a few of those programs lying around), got my own (junky) Linux desktop from my cousin, tried to learn VBasic (without a Windows machine), and eventually made it to high school… In college, I studied computer science and mathematics, mostly programming in Java/.NET, although with a bit of everything in the mix. A few of my oldest programming posts on this blog are from that time.

After that, on to grad school! Originally, I was going to study computational linguistics, but that fell through. Then programming languages (the school’s specialty). And finally I ended up studying censorship and computer security… before taking a hard turn into the private sector to follow my PhD advisor.

Since then, I’ve worked in the computer security space at a couple of different companies. Some don’t exist any more, some you’ve probably heard of. I still program for fun too, and not just in security.

But really, I still have a habit of doing a little bit of everything. Whatever seems interesting at the time!

Popular Github Repos

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backup -- 4☆
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jpverkamp.github.io -- 2☆

Posts

WebCrypto SHA-256 HMAC

2025-02-05

A quick random thing I learned that I found helpful (and you might too!):

async function hmac(text, secret) {
    let enc = new TextEncoder("utf-8");
    let algorithm = { name: "HMAC", hash: "SHA-256" };
    
    let key = await crypto.subtle.importKey("raw", enc.encode(secret), algorithm, false, ["sign", "verify"]);
    let signature = await crypto.subtle.sign(algorithm.name, key, enc.encode(text));
    let digest = btoa(String.fromCharCode(...new Uint8Array(signature)));

    return digest;
}

This is a function that uses the Web Crypto API to calculate a SHA-256 HMAC of a string given a secret value.

I mostly worked this out so that I could figure out how exactly TextEncoder worked, along with importKey (to turn a secret into proper key material) and also how to convert that back into a hex digest.

>> await hmac("lorem ipsum", "super secret")
"qArFX93Zi83ccIayhYnuFDpd4pk3eB4rZYDvNteobSU="

>> await hmac("lorem ipsum doler sit amet", "super secret")
"klTAioH5nNkguNhU2YcJshaZZtJW9DEb+MTqz4NWq8E="

>> await hmac("lorem ipsum", "even more super secret!")
"RoQLg2uz5KWLMJM72VExH5gZOls5bdZZyzHi678eDWs=" 

>> await hmac("lorem ipsum", "super secret")
"qArFX93Zi83ccIayhYnuFDpd4pk3eB4rZYDvNteobSU="

Disclaimer: This totally counts as rolling your own crypto. Don’t do this unless you know what you’re doing. 😄

Disclaimer disclaimer: I only rarely know what I’m doing. 😄 😄

Also, for what it’s worth, this is equivalent to the Python standard libraries’ hmac + base64 :

>>> base64.b64encode(hmac.digest(b'super secret', b'lorem ipsum', 'SHA256')).decode()
'qArFX93Zi83ccIayhYnuFDpd4pk3eB4rZYDvNteobSU='

Freshly (Frosted) Solved

2025-01-23

And so it begins. Freshly Frosted It’s a cute little puzzle game about making a donut factory. It’s a lot like Solving Cosmic Express in that it’s a ‘puzzle on rails’, you are basically routing around the grid from source to target. In the way, we have to go to certain tiles in a certain order (in this case, to apply toppings to our donuts). Let’s do it! The first section (starting with Basic layout) is the final state of the solution.

AoC 2024 Day 25: Christmas Lockpickinator

2024-12-25

Source: Day 25: Code Chronicle

Full solution for today (spoilers!).

Part 1

You are given a series of locks and keys (see below). How many unique (lock, key) are there that do not overlap (they do not have to fit perfectly).
A lock starts from the top. The entire top row is # and the entire bottom row is ..
#####
.####
.####
.####
.#.#.
.#...
.....
A key is the opposite:
.....
.....
.....
#....
#.#..
#.#.#
#####

AoC 2024 Day 24: Ripple Carrinator

2024-12-24

Source: Day 24: Crossed Wires

Full solution for today (spoilers!).

Part 1

Given a collection of gates of the form arg0 (AND|OR|XOR) arg2 -> out and input values of form x** and y**, what is the value of z** interpreted as a binary number?

AoC 2024 Day 23: LAN Partinator

2024-12-23

Source: Day 23: LAN Party

Full solution for today (spoilers!).

Part 1

You are given the edges of an undirected graph. Count how many complete subgraphs of size three exist that contain one or more starting with the letter t.

You are given a series of points on a 71x71 grid. Taking only the first 1024 points, how long is the shortest path from (0, 0) to (70, 70)?