work

I started to feel a lot more normal at work this week. I am still behind and catching up to where I want to be in class, but I think the worst is behind me. I pushed hard with my coauthors Kevin and Pino to hit the FOCS deadline on Wednesday! I think we ended up with a really cool paper on PIR that I hope to share in the near future. Wish us luck with the reviews! Getting past the deadline as means that I can focus on new projects, and I already have a few that I think will turn into interesting papers.

In my class, I just covered PKE with ElGamal and RSA encryption, and next week, we'll talk about digital signatures! This is the most exciting part of the class for me, but it also means that I think I have a tendency to speed up to get to the fun ideas. Fortunately, the prep class for my cryptography course is careful to cover a lot of the math and ideas. So, for many students, it's easy to expand on these and understand how they fit into cryptography and security games.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I decided to rewatch Phil Rogaway's Moral Character of Cryptography talk yesterday. (Funnily enough, one of his results he mentions here makes a debut in our FOCS paper!) It's been over 10 years, but I think the points he made still ring very true. And as I've been thinking about what problems to tackle next, I've tried to bear his words of warning in mind. I'm certainly not perfect when it comes to thinking about the social impact of my work, but I hope to get better by actively thinking through consequences of different technology.

non-work

Most of my time outside of work has been dedicated to getting my new apartment in working order. It feels really good to set up a new place and get into new routines, and I'm much happier here than where I was before! I have the space and resources to invest in making my home more comfortable and enjoy the time that I spend here.

I've also played my fair share of Slay the Spire 2 mostly with my friends and my partner. It's a really fun game even though I'm not very good at it, and I like the new characters they added a lot. Also, I forgot to mention I think that last week my friends and I finished our run of Baldur's Gate 3! We ended with very few main party characters and the ones we had remaining died in the epilogue, which wasn't ideal. But it did make the party at the end of the game a bit ironic.

I also finished reading Brave New World and started a short BBC dramatization of Nineteen Eighty-Four! I hadn't read either before, but I can already see why people think they're interesting juxtapositions to each other. I found the world-building in Brave New World to be really fun to read about, but honestly I felt that the ending was a bit weird and fell flat for me. This probably was largely because the whole discussion of religion and god's manifestation took me out of the story. The reification of Shakespeare throughout the story was also a little strange, but that's because I never really connected with his works. Overall, I think I got a much better understanding of the fears around recent psychological and biological advancements at time of writing. Definitely worth the short read!

questions

• Are there lower bound differences for PIR vs authenticated PIR?
  • More generally, what separations exist between the efficiency of semi-honest vs malicious MPC?
  • I think you can pretty much always as ZKPs for NP using a OWF, but this comes at some efficiency cost. Have people looked at these differences?
• What is the societal value in building crypto from alternate assumptions?
  • Is it more important to just focus on the assumptions that are used today and cryptanalyze them?

Thanks for reading to the end! Here's a picture of Timmy enjoying his same chair in the new place: