relaxed and spooky week
work
This was a very nice and relaxing week for me. I was able to make some marginal progress on research, apply for an Amazon research award, meet with an undergrad, make some plans for my class, and come up with ideas for the Cybersecurity curriculum updates. Everything was relatively minor and only took up a bit of time. It's nice to have such a boring week after the crazy one last time. My hope is that this calmness continues for the rest of the semester. I felt like I was in a rhythm all week to get things done that I've had to put off. At this rate, though, I'd make a lot of progress, which will help a lot going into the next semester.
One important update is that I finally got access to the Stevens' PhD recruitment system! I'm hoping to start reaching out for interviews soon.
non-work
Last weekend was a lot of fun. I made pancakes and started an Arcs campaign with my friend. We did the first two acts, but haven't gotten around to the third one yet. During the week, I had some chances to play Hades 2 and Silksong and got a lot done. I'm already on a pretty good win-streak in Hades 2 and have started climbing the fear-ladder.
I finished The Obelisk Gate and started The Stone Sky too! I'm very excited to see how the story arc ends! The magic system in the story hasn't felt as fleshed out or consistent as I'd hoped, but the characters more than make up for it. I'm holding out hope to really have it all come together, though.
I didn't do much on Halloween. Pretty much just went shopping and dressed up my cat in a low-effort way (see below).
questions
What are the best pubic-key encryption and digital signatures to show in a cryptography course?
I think I always see RSA, because it very-nicely gives both
Diffie-Hellman is an easy one to add to
I wonder if it'd be good to have a lattice or code-based one, especially since NIST is standardizing PQ-crypto
What are the best quantum attacks against LWE and LPN?
What creative ideas do they use beyond Gover's algorithm?
What oblivious data structures might require less overhead when constructed directly from ORAM?
Thanks for reading to the end! Here’s the promised picture of my last minute cat “costume:”
