Hope everyone who got hit by the winter storm this week stays safe and warm. We were fortunate in Hoboken and didn't lose power.

work

I may have bitten off more than I can chew these past few weeks. This week work felt like it was nonstop, and I still am running behind on my S&P reviews. I have two papers I'd like to submit to Crypto. One should get submitted easily, as long as we can finish the implementation and run a few tests. The other requires me to do a good bit of writing, and I hope I still have the time to get it together. (It doesn't help that my coauthor had a good idea on a third project which has distracted me.)

Aside from research keeping me busy, my class seems to be going well! This week I finally got to get into crypto definitions! We did perfect secrecy, the key length limitations of perfect secrecy, and PRG definitions. Somehow my lecture still ended up finishing early despite me trying to go slowly. The students seemed happy to be let out early, but I clearly have some more work to do on lecture planning and pacing lectures. Next week is LFSRs, RC4, and block ciphers!

non-work

Even when I'm busy at work, I make sure to carve out time to try to relax. There was less of that this week, but my friends and I still managed to reach the Peak in Peak (twice!)! I also continued running (in 6 degree F weather!) while listening to Sandworm, but I'm not even halfway through it yet.

My friend was also visiting NYC! I hadn't seen him in person in 7 years, so it was really nice to catch up. He works in industry and has the chance to move into the city, so I think he wanted to know my impressions of it as someone who is originally from the suburbs of SC. We'll see what he ends up doing, but I'd be great to have another friend in the area!

questions

• Can you build Key Agreement from a hash function like SHA??
  • This paper shows that you can build a primitive unconditionally in the Random Oracle Model and that it (non-black-box) implies OT.
  • Unless there's a reason the resulting construction is uninstantiable, it seems to imply that SHA (which we often treat as an RO) could build Key Agreement.
• Are there generic "garbled Turing machines" the same way there are garbled circuits?
  • Or alternatively, are there circuits which allow variable input length?
  • These might be useful for considering secure size-hiding computation

Thanks for reading to the end! Here are couple pictures from this very snowy week.