work

I'm officially back from San Diego and excited to start the semester. I tried hard to be as prepared for my class as possible and feel pretty good. Though, I still have a nagging feeling that there are some things I'm forgetting or things that'll just have to be figured out on the fly. There probably isn't much I can do about that except just teach a class and get used to it. Wish me (and my students) luck!

I'm glad that I was able to keep up with work while being away. I have a few projects that are all starting back up for the new year to hopefully submit soon. And, I actually submitted a paper to CCS too! We made some important revisions right before, and I think the paper makes a bit more sense. Admittedly though, the paper is pretty complicated with a mix of abstract modeling and LLM inference details. The break and relaxation also seemed to spur a few other projects forward with some new ideas! But more on that in the future, probably.

non-work

Most of my fun outside of work this week was back in San Diego with my partner. Last weekend we explored Ocean Beach, along the Sunset Cliffs, for the first time after getting a tasty meal in Little Italy! It was warm out like summer and such a beautiful walk. It always amazes me how diverse the landscape and plants in SoCal are, and this walk highlighted just out different the coastline itself can vary. We also finished Stranger Things just before I flew back! Overall, I'd say the ending was pretty good, and I'm glad that the writers didn't write in some Deus Ex Machina that made the epilogue feel incredulous. There definitely was some room for improvement, but I realize that I have maybe different tastes in what makes a good ending compared to others.

Since I've been back, it's been a bit less eventful. I'm still reading through Isles of the Emberdark and Who Owns This Sentence?. I also finally beat the upstairs in Hades 2 on 24 fear!! I'm still looking for the fates, but making pretty swift progress at this point. I was able to do all of the achievements in the first Hades, and I'd like to do that again. I've heard its much harder though in this game, so we'll see. I'm also back to playing games on my normal computer and hanging out with my friends online. I'm glad I can keep up with them better now. It's always hard during the holidays or when I'm traveling.

questions

• Is there specific cryptography that would help the design of end-to-end encrypted calendars?
  • I feel like there aren't very good end-to-end encrypted calendar options that are efficient and cross-compatible
  • Are there open-source calendar interoperability standards? I feel like everything I've seen is centered around Google/Outlook/Apple calendars.
  • What is leaked by current e2ee calendars? What is the minimal leakage for the interoperability that people want?
• Are there something like lower bound for secure election systems?
  • Algorithmic lower bounds for election systems would apply to secure ones, but can you do better? Or show that certain methods can't work?
  • Would it be interesting to show that some election systems cannot be computed securely with pairing?

Thanks for reading to the end! Here's are a few pictures from the San Diego!