work

I finished my Eurocrypt reviews early! I wanted to get ahead of schedule to free up my Thanksgiving week, and managed to push through the papers this week and get all the reviews in. Most of my papers were really interesting too! I hope a lot of them appear in the conference, but I'm sure there were many I didn't review that'll be competitive too.

My collaborator, Pino, was able to stop by Stevens again before he leaves the city too! We got on a call with Kevin too and worked out some extra details about one of our PIR projects. Other than the reviews and this project, I didn't have a lot of time to work on other projects. I still was able to do a bit of writing and keep all my regular meetings. I also went to a really cool talk about recent work finding counter-examples to a (Erdős-related) conjecture. It was the Stevens ACC Seminar, and the talk and paper were written by Eric Ramos there.

non-work

Last weekend, my partner and I played through the first chapter of The Past Within! It's a fun puzzle game that requires coordination and communication between two parties. I'd played some of the other Rusty Lake games before with my friends, and I think they're really good at designing this genre of games. We also started a short book called Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, which I should finish up soon. It has a pretty good message that's a good reminder to help live in the moment.

Somehow, my friends and I were also able to carve out time to start a new run of For The King. Last time I played, the game's save file corrupted near the end of the run. That pretty much kept me from retrying the game for a long while. Hopefully, we're luckier this time.

Other than all that, I'm excited about next week! My partner is coming to Hoboken, and I'll get to see my family too.

questions

• What are the main difference between the standard model, the CRS model, and the random oracle model? When are some acceptable?
  • I think this may also be related to trusted setup, which is often implicit in scheme and not captured in the security definition.
• What are the simplest blind signature protocols to understand?
  • I'm trying to catch up on the literature to learn the open problems.

Thanks for reading to the end! Here's a photo of the Hudson from the main Stevens cafeteria: