work

On reflection, this week was pretty crazy, but honestly I feel pretty relaxed this morning. I got back to NJ early Tuesday morning and had a busy 4 days of work. Tuesday was basically a zombie day for me, where I was just going through motions until I could collapse and catch up on sleep. Then, on Wednesday, I was scrambling to get my lecture together about attacks on various RSA cryptosystems and how to select key lengths in practice. Unfortunately, because it was so hot and the cooling system in Babbio broke, my class got moved online! I still got through the material, but lecturing to students through Zoom was not very fun. That was enough of a taste of COVID learning for me. I feel really bad for all the students who had to do that for ~2 years before.

Thursday and Friday were much more fun though! I was still scrambling to release the final project for my class, but my postdoc Ojaswi officially started on Thursday!! It was nice to have another experience cryptographer to talk with, and I'm very excited to start working on some new research with her. On Friday, there was NY Theory Day that both Ojaswi and I went to at Colubmia. It had been a while since I saw many of them, and it was good to catch up. I also met a few new people and exchanged some research ideas. Can't wait to get started on those and hopefully make progress this summer :).

non-work

The back half of my week didn't have a lot of time outside of work, since I was scrambling for my class and talking with others. But last weekend was really fun in San Diego! My partner and I were able to go to the beach for a while, visit Balboa Park, and talk a lot of long walks around the Marina. It was extremely fun and I only got a little sunburned :). I'm excited to see her again next month and over the summer too.

questions

• What the "right" model for honest-but-curious quantum protocols?
  • This paper identifies some key differences between two reasonable-looking definitions
  • One of the intuitive differences is asking whether the semi-honest party is allowed to entangle the quantum state of the honest protocol with their own private bits or not.
• Has anyone considered extending prior works to the quantum setting? I think black-box reductions have a lot of different little tweaks that one can make.

Thanks for reading to the end! Here are some pictures from San Diego.