dotnet WASI applications in .NET 8.0

2023/09/27

At the end of last year I blogged about using .NET 7 and the prototype dotnet WASI SDK from Steve Sanderson to build WASM-WASI applications. That SDK is now deprecated and the WASI workload has instead been integrated into the main .NET 8, which will ship in November this year. The workload is still flagged as experimental, but there is now commitment from the .NET runtime and SDK teams to make the WASM-WASI experience first class in .NET.

In this post we will explore where this workload is at today, and what we can and can’t do with it at this stage.

Using embeddings model with Azure OpenAI Service

2023/09/13

azure ai openai

I recently blogged about building GPT-powered applications with Azure OpenAI Service. In that post, we looked at using the text-davinci-003 model to provide classification capabilities for natural text - more specifically, we categorized and rated scientific papers based on the interest area (note that the recommended model for this task now is gpt-35-turbo now).

In today’s post we are going to continue exploring Azure OpenAI Service, this time looking at the embeddings model, text-embedding-ada-002.

Announcing Strathweb.Dilithium - a set of ASP.NET helper libraries for post quantum cryptography

2023/08/22

security quantum computing c-sharp asp.net core cryptography

Earlier this year I blogged about post-quantum cryptography in .NET using Dilithium and Kyber. This was then followed by another post, which showed how Dilithium can be wired into a popular .NET Identity Server, Duende Identity Server, for token signing purposes.

Today I would like to announce Strathweb.Dilithium, a set of .NET helper libraries to facilitate working with Dilithium in ASP.NET Core projects.

Calling Rust code from Swift on iOS and macOS

2023/07/25

rust swift ios macos ffi

In the last post we covered how UniFFI can be used to elegantly create C bindings and generate bridge C# code that allows for calling native code written in Rust from a C# program. Today, we are going to build upon that, and we will show - in a true cross platform fashion - how the same core Rust library we used last time around, and the same toolchain that we have already set up, can be used to generate similar bindings for Swift. This will enable us to reuse our native Rust code in an iOS or macOS application.

Calling Rust code from C#

2023/06/22

rust csharp net ffi

There are plenty of reasons to be excited about Rust. Rust provides cross-platform compatibility and can compile to nearly any platform, including Windows, iOS, Android, and many more. One of Rust’s core features is its focus on memory safety. It accomplishes this through its ownership model, which helps prevent common bugs such as null pointer dereferencing, dangling pointers, and data races.

All of this makes Rust an excellent alternative to C++/C for implementing shared logic and algorithms, spanning many different platforms.

In this post we shall see how we can integrate Rust into program written in C# - and how a native library built with Rust can be called into from a .NET application.

QIR Runner for ARM64 Macs is now available

2023/05/12

q-sharp quantum computing qir

In January I blogged about using the QIR Runner as an alternative (or even preferred!) way for simulating your Q# programs locally. The main reason behind that were performance gains (QIR runner is written in Rust), standardization (same intermediate format used as input into the simulator and the quantum hardware) and the complete incompatibility of the default QDK full state simulator with ARM64 processor architecture (even under x64 emulation).

One major limitation of the QIR Runner was that it was also x64 compatible only, but at least still worked well on ARM processors under emulation. This limitation has now been addressed.

Building GPT powered applications with Azure OpenAI Service

2023/04/26

azure ai openai

In this post we will have a look at how we can utilize Azure OpenAI Service to build applications using various OpenAI models. At the high level, Azure OpenAI allows accessing GPT-4, GPT-3, Codex and Embeddings models using the security boundary of Azure, and while ensuring data privacy and residency and conforming to other common enterprise requirements such as private networking. In other words, it addresses one of the biggest worries of integrating AI services into own applications - the data is never shared with OpenAI.

Post-quantum token signing with Dilithium using Duende Identity Server

2023/03/24

security duende quantum computing oidc net 7

On March 12th, a new IETF draft JOSE and COSE Encoding for Dilithium was published. It describes JSON serializations for CRYSTALS-Dilithium, a post-quantum cryptography suite. This in turn allows using post-quantum cryptography for tasks like signing JSON Web Tokens in a standardized fashion.

I previously blogged about using CRYSTALS-Dilithium from .NET applications, so in this post let’s see how we can apply this new draft to one of the most popular .NET OpenID Connect / OAuth 2.0 servers, Duende Identity Server

Beware of the default ASP.NET Core Identity settings

2023/03/02

security net 7 net core asp.net core

The other day I was involved in setting up a new project based on ASP.NET Core Identity, when I noticed something related to the default configuration that I thought would be worth sharing here.

Of course, while in general it is not great to rely on default settings of any product (especially when it is the security backbone of your application!) one also expects sensible defaults to be provided.

Let’s have a look.

Post quantum cryptography in .NET

2023/02/21

security quantum computing c-sharp net 7 cryptography

I have written extensively about quantum computing on this blog before. Quantum computing has the potential to break many of the cryptographic systems that we use today. Shor’s algorithm, for example, can efficiently factor large numbers, which would make widely-used asymmetric cryptography schemes such as RSA and elliptic curves insecure.

In this post, we’ll explore how to use post-quantum cryptography from a C# program, using CRYSTALS-Kyber and CRYSTALS-Dilithium as examples.

StrathWeb. A free flowing tech monologue.