work

I'm still really busy, especially with the upcoming Crypto deadline. Fortunately though, this week was the first where it didn't feel like my work was ramping up. Hopefully, that means I've stabilized my work flow for the semester, but I'm sure things might go off the rails after I give a midterm or something.

I was pretty happy with how my course went this week too. My lecture used the whole time, and the class asked a lot of good questions about LFSRs, RC4, and block ciphers. I had to rush a bit at the end, so I'll probably recap a little before next week. After that, though, we get to do PRP and CPA security!

non-work

A lot of my leisure time was consumed this week, unfortunately. I was still able to keep up with reading and managed to get in a few Hades 2 runs (which are basically just me trying to finish up some achievements). Other than that, I spent a lot of time prepping for my move in a couple of months. My landlord is selling the place I'm currently in, so I need to find a new place to live. I think I managed to find one too! Hopefully everything works out in the coming weeks, and I end up there without issue.

questions

• How popular is Piazza at schools?
  • I recently found out that most of my students at Stevens hadn't heard to Piazza.
  • I guess Slack and Discord have emerged as the bigger competitors in the field.
• Are there searchable encryption contexts where client upload is much more expensive than download?
  • This would help motivate one of the research problems I'm working on. :-)

Thanks for reading to the end! Here's a picture of Timmy playing in the snow this week.