work

Work this week was honestly relatively normal. I'm still getting used to a new routine at my new place, but I feel a lot more settled in to living there. I have a really nice set up for working from home when I want to do that that is a lot more comfortable than my setup at my last place. I still really like physically going in to work, but it's nice to have the option now that I'm slightly further from Stevens.

The main update this week is that we started the Crypto rebuttal phase, and fortunately both the papers I submitted weren't early rejected. Hopefully, we can convince the reviewers that the papers are interesting enough to publish this year, but we'll see! My class has also been plugging along, and we just covered Digital Signatures and will wrap up with some more practical lectures in the coming weeks I think.

non-work

It was a good week outside of work! I'm actually writing this from San Diego where I'm visiting my partner. It's only a quick trip, but I always like seeing her and escaping the cold for a little bit. I was able to meet some of her new friends in the area too! But I'm mostly looking forward to visiting museums and relaxing on the beach as much as possible. I'll be back next Tuesday though to resume my more regular schedule.

I also finished 1984 which was super short and have started Severance by Ling Ma. I'm not why I've been recently drawn toward dystopia novels, but I've been enjoying them a lot! For me though, Brave New World was the most interesting. I think the totalitarian state in 1984 didn't feel as fleshed out or interesting, but of course the length is a big difference between the two books. We'll have to see how Severance plays out to pandemic dystopias are more or less appealing.

questions

• What kinds of signatures can be built from OWF/OWP/CR hash functions?
  • I was trying to quickly understand some older signature constructions that are many-time secure and build on Lamport. Some of them were stateful and some seemed to require that a polynomial number of messages that they could support was specified before the key generation.
  • Can all these limitations be overcome? I wasn't sure just from a quick survey
  • This probably is answered, but what's the latest on hash-based signatures? Are there still open practical/theoretical questions?
  • I'd also be interested in showing efficiency lower bounds if there are any
• What PIR algorithms have the least expensive client side decoding procedure?
  • Many current algorithms require a RLWE ciphertext decryption, which is often expensive in practice
  • Are there older/simpler schemes that would work and still maintain good efficiency?

Thanks for reading to the end! Here are some pictures I've taken at my new place of my cat and the trees. I'm excited that we're finally moving into spring!