work

This week was a bit of a mix between stressful and very chill. I'm so excited that I get to focus more on research! So, I've been meeting and thinking a lot about the problems that I didn't get to think about during the semester. Unfortunately, a lot of that time was diverted by the Asiacrypt deadline this Thursday. We managed to resubmit a work that I'm excited about with a really interesting last-minute addition to the paper! Afterward though I realized that some of our macros didn't render properly in the submitted version. I hope the reviewers are able to still make sense of the paper, because it was a really easy fix. I feel dumb for not catching it at submission time.

My research meetings went well though! I think my undergraduate researchers are excited to pick up the pace for the summer. And my postdoc, Ojaswi, and I already have some ideas for extending some works in PIR! I'm planning to reach back out to some other coauthors very soon to restart some of the projects that stalled during the semester.

non-work

The week outside of work was really fun too! The week didn't have a lot that happened, outside of a few Slay the Spire 2 wins. But, my dad flew in on Friday, and we spent all of Saturday in NYC! (Hence the slightly delayed post) He's only staying till this afternoon, but we had a lot of fun. We went to get brunch, see the MJ musical, walked around Central Park (before it started raining too much), and went to eat at my partner and my favorite vegan dim sum place. Today, we'll stay more local and just explore a rainy Hoboken for a bit.

I also continued to read The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order! It's been very interesting so far, and it makes me realize how little of the 20th century I understand. The parallels between the fall of the New Deal Order he's already recapped and some things going on today are stark. I'm excited to hear more about how the Neoliberal order develops and read a new perspective on the alleged current fall of it.

questions

• When is it appropriate to use a pebbling model vs a random oracle model?
  • I saw this paper just today that gives some relevant results. It wasn't even a question I'd thought about before.
• What are considered "standard" hash function security assumptions beyond collision resistance?
  • I had a problem where I thought I needed like k-XOR hardness, and I felt a little uncomfortable with that.
  • I saw there were a lot of other assumptions. And I guess any (instantiable) assumption that's hard relative to a random oracle could be considered "standard" since people assume the ROM all the time.
  • I guess maybe it's better to ask when a specific non-RO assumption is seen as an improvement over the ROM?
  • Turns out I didn't need a hardness assumption at all, but maybe more on that if a paper comes of it. :-)

Thanks for reading to the end! Here is a picture from the musical yesterday! Really cool set work and choreography.