You’re Not Cleared to Read This (Unless You Understand Lattices)
Audience: high-schoolundergraduategraduate
This article explores how a simple mathematical structure, the lattice, plays a powerful role in computer security. Starting with the idea of partially ordered sets (posets), it builds up to how lattice theory governs information flow through real-world systems like SELinux and the Bell-LaPadula model. Through a story involving a spy, a top-secret document, and the rule of “no write down,” the post shows how math can enforce trust, block leaks, and even help compilers catch privacy bugs before code runs. Blending visual intuition, accessible math, and real-world relevance, this post reveals how the invisible structure of a lattice quietly keeps our secrets safe.
Analytics
Comments
A decent introduction to lattices! It’s a topic that I had always heard about but never really looked into, and I never realized how simple it is. I did find the conclusion to be a little silly with how philosophical it was getting, which seemed to detract from the article a bit.
That was a great read! It feels nicely self-contained, and provided all information I needed to understand it as a whole. Unlike a lot of math articles I’ve seen so far, this one seems to have a direct real-world application, which makes it a lot more interesting to me.
The duality between the model and the algebra, where the former describes the rules, and the latter enforces them, seems very intuitive and elegant. It’s like the duality between “data” and “code”.
The title seems kind of nonsensical though, since the article itself explains what a lattice is. Or, eh, it could be just a joke and I’m reading too much into it.
Another minor nitpick, the footer at the bottom of the screen is kind of annoying and takes up precious vertical space, there should be a way to hide it IMHO.
Finally, the article has a “high-school” target audience assigned to it on the SOME4 page, in addition to “undergraduate” and “graduate”, but this article seems a bit too advanced for high school.
The article is well written and pacing is good, though maybe too much emphasis on the operations.
I see two problems with the article: 1- Lattices are explained, but they are not related to the problem itself, which is just performing two simple checks. The operations are introduced but not used. Dorothy’s paper is mentioned but there is no insight as to why it is relevant. In other words, the problem proposed could have been explained and solved without mentioning lattices.
2- Secure Software Development is mentioned and seems like an interesting topic, but no insight is provided on how lattices are used.
I believe it would have been more interesting and relevtant to lattices to go into more detail in SSD or Dorothy’s paper. For the problem presented it is overkill and not even part of the solution.
I liked how you themed your article with the Spy’s Dilemma. That said, I think specifying this in the introduction aids in keeping the intro and conclusion well-ordered. The Ranking score you received is an average of these individual categories: Motivation: 9 Clarity: 5 Novelty: 5 Memorability: 5
The chunks of text could be made more digestible with images. Clear explanations overall.
Really useful analogy, and very practical as it covers LBAC (a very useful model for cyber security). It draws on intuition, but also providing formal maths to back the concept. Thoroughly enjoyed it.
Excellent presentation - this was so much fun to follow along with. The amount of abstract maths introduced maybe felt a little overkill for the applications being discussed, but I do think the formal yet intuitive coverage was really valuable, so maybe detail on how the more esoteric parts of lattice theory are used could have been beneficial. On the whole though, I loved this!