work

Work this week was super busy! The Crypto deadline was on Thursday. I was expecting to just submit one paper with a group on size-hiding symmetric PIR. But, my coauthors Gabe and Ruth put in a lot of really great last-minute work, and I ended up with two different submissions. It was really impressive, and the paper has some really interesting ideas. Hope both submissions do well!

There were a lot of other things that happened this week too. My lecture went really well I think. We got through PRP and CPA security, and we're all set up to talk about block cipher modes before moving on to authentication. I also got the students' updates on their first project, had a few other research meetings for non-Crypto papers, and was invited to the TCC 2026 program committee! Looking forward to moving forward on all those things in the coming weeks and months with more updates.

non-work

Work kept me busy until the Crypto deadline, but on Thursday my partner flew in from San Diego! We're going to spend the weekend celebrating Valentine's and Lunar New Year. Mostly we'll be hanging in the city and doing more pottery making. We're always excited to go to our favorite Vegan Dim Sum place for any occasion, so it'll be fun.

This week, I also finished Sandworm and started listening to Margret Atwood's Burning Questions. I actually learned a lot from Sandworm about the cybersecurity landscape and threats in the world. It definitely gave me some food for thought about how important it is to be able to circumvent layers of software and have more manual control. It really worries me about future systems that use LLMs as some critical part of the control. It definitely motivated me to understand AI and cybersecurity research more. Maybe I'll even find cryptography problems to attack based on that landscape.

questions

I didn't have much time to come up with new questions, unfortunately. :-) Though I had some of the older questions around size-hiding multiparty computation on my mind. Things like completeness for size-hiding computation and size-hiding SPIR with client-side preprocessing.

Thanks for reading to the end! Here's a picture of my cat from this week.