work

Working hard last week definitely paid off. I still had a lot of work to do, but it was manageable. Class this week was very low-key. Most of the material was review from the student's previous CS 503 class, so I ran through number theory and basic group theory really quickly. Interestingly, the students hadn't covered the Diffie-Hellman computational assumptions, so that was the main new material in the course. I'm still not 100% what material I want to cover precisely after spring break. In broad strokes, I'll do encryption, signatures, parts of PKI and TLS. I also want to cover some parameter choices, but I also think the students have probably seen a lot of that math. In the meantime, all my students are preparing for the midterm next week! Good luck to all of them!

I also had a bit of time to do research this week. I split time on a few different projects. Some we've run into new roadblocks, but other ones, we're in the process of writing our results out. Hopefully, we can clear up the ones that are stuck, because the results are really cool. (Plus, I want to spend time working on new projects :-).)

non-work

Another benefit of working ahead was having a bit more personal time. Unfortunately, this week was honestly pretty stressful and hectic on this front. A family member was sick, and I've been trying to finalize paperwork for my move, which compounded on the stress of the whole family. It also hurt that I couldn't really help to take care of them either because I'm up in NJ and everyone else is in SC. It's just an unfortunate consequence of moving away from home.

I did have some time to keep momentum on the Cryptology City! I just did a big refactor last night, so sorry about that if you were working on the pages. Right now, I'm still mostly trying to fill a lot of basic primitives in notation that I like. I don't know when, but I hope to eventually go more into adding citations stating some non-trivial results. It's tough though, because there are just so many cryptographic primitives and assumptions :-). I also want to add concepts like assumption "falsifiability" and maybe write about random oracle programming and more. We'll how far I get on this momentum I have right now.

questions

• Have people explored the idea of "trapdoor" memory-hard hash functions?
  • Would there be some motivation what would allow some parties to compute a hash faster or with less space?
• What is the best way to teach public-key cryptography?
  • Is it worth going through key exchange security definitions?
  • Is it better to just jump straight to RSA security?
• What is the best notation for protocols?
  • Asking for both my class notes and for Cryptology City.

Thanks for reading to the end! This week, I just have a picture of Timmy trying to fit into a small basket: