Papers and Pipers
June 20, 2016
The week of February 14 was one of the hardest weeks I’ve had. It was both physically and mentally exhausting with a good dose of stress. Apparently this happens in academia but I sure hope to avoid it as much as possible. That week contained three events of significance. An international flight to Barbados, the Glee Club Spring Show, and the USENIX security deadline. Of these, by far the most important was the deadline.
USENIX security is the top publishing venue in my field (Applied Cryptography and Security) and my group had three papers to submit. Two of the three were very high profile and collaborative, and the one remaining a product of our group alone. They were also not quite ready to be published. The one which was eventually accepted “DROWN: Breaking TLS using SSLv2” describes a method by which a malicious person could read internet communications that were supposedly encrypted, numbering up to 29% of all HTTPS connections. excitingly enough our work was even reported in the mainstream media, but this didn’t alleviate the amount of work needed to get it ready for publication.
Another one of the publications with which I was involved was “A Systematic Analysis of the Juniper Dual EC Incident” that examines how attempts to backdoor the security capabilities of a class of corporate network devices backfired and allowed a malicious entity to commandeer it for themselves. Again our research was reported in the media much to my excitement. Both papers had policy implications as decisions made for policy reasons impacted the development of the above technologies and lead both directly and indirectly to the vulnerabilities. My lab and I consider this to be a fruitful research direction and hope to publish more papers in related areas.
These two and the other paper ensured my days started early, and even without rehearsals, would have ended late. I was in the lab every day by 9.30AM, and left at around 6.30PM for rehearsal. Rehearsals were enjoyable but I couldn’t fully commit myself knowing there was work to be done. I made sure I was present for the bare minimum needed to perform and left most nights at 10PM to get back to the lab to stay there until 3 or 4AM when Nadia, Luke, Josh Fried (a new undergraduate lab-mate) and I physically couldn’t stay productive. While the work environment was fun with Phillip Glass or Europop in the background, it was tough to focus and be productive for so many hours a day. Definitely not the optimal way for me to produce high quality work consistently.
The show later in the week was immensely enjoyable, despite the publication pressure. I featured as one of three depressed clowns in a failing circus, and had a few starring moments. The Penn Pipers (the Glee Club barbershop and do-wop barbershop subset) also had two numbers in the show and I had a few more moments there. Overall, the best part of the show was the musicality that our new director Joshua Glassman brought to our ensemble. This being our first spring show with him presented many challenges, and his busy schedule as a freelance musician all put pressures on everyone, but gladly, it all came together.
Finally, there was my flight to Barbados for a conference, scheduled to depart 6AM Sunday morning from JFK airport, NYC. Unfortunately, the final performance of the Glee Club show was scheduled for less than 12 hours prior, and so immediately following the closing of the curtains, I grabbed by bag, sprinted to a cab and caught the train to NYC…
Dvořák Symphony No. 9
June 16, 2016
The journey to Croatia was somewhat more eventful than I’d have hoped. First a train to Newark, then a flight to Toronto. While there I spent my layover in the lounge and attempted to make myself some soup, only spilling the boiling water over my hands and shattering a bowl. Not an ideal start. As I was cleaning up, my backpack split along the seams, spilling my clothes and books onto the floor. After I cleaned up from that I relaxed on an Air Canada flight to Heathrow, albeit with a throbbing sensation in my left hand. My flight was unfortunately a little delayed and that left me with a forty-five minute sprint to transfer in Heathrow and dash through the terminals to catch my flight to Split, Croatia, just as the gate was closing.
When I landed in Croatia, a bus was waiting for me and a few other cryptographers to go Šibenik, a small resort town on the coast where I would be partaking in a cryptography summer school. On the bus I met a few students from Royal Holloway, University of London, Ben, Lydia and Torben who were all lovely. Once there I almost collapsed in exhaustion, barely managing to say hi to Luke before crashing for a few hours.
The next day was fairly unremarkable, with some introductory talks given, and more sneaking out on my part to try and recover from minor illness and some jetlag. It was day two of the program that really shined. Luke introduced me to Henry, a very talented and outspoken student of djb and Tanja Lange’s. He further introduced us to a few friends of his including Isis, another person I enjoyed spending time with alongside the brits. djb (Dan Berstein) and Tanja are collaborators of ours who do a lot of excellent work in cryptography and thus it was also quite exciting to meet the two of them. Tanja in particular had been delivering kosher, vegan, gummy candies to the lab via Nadia and thus needed much thanks for it.
A few things were really notable at the conference. One was different social circles that people mixed in. Some people definitely aligned themselves more with cypherpunk culture while others maintained more academic detachment. There were plenty of people with radical political views, mostly close to the anarchical and left leaning sides of the spectrum, and it was an interesting chance to hear their views. On a more academic side, the european’s were much more heavily focused on symmetric encryption (where you meet ahead of time to exchange a password) as opposed to our work which focused more on asymmetric (where you do some fancy maths to share something privately).
My last day in Croatia was spent on a tour of Kornati national park, composed of a series of rocky islands that we reached over the course of a three hour boat ride. It was a really nice chance to unwind and spend more time getting to know colleagues in a social situation. I read on the beach, dipped in the water, ate ice cream and climbed to the top of a hill along with friends and lab-mates. Altogether a great day.
At 2.50AM I was off on my way home. This trip wasn’t entirely pleasant either. I arrived hours too early at Split airport, where I called Celeste (more on her at a later point) to chat for thirty minutes while I attempted to stay awake for check-in. A short flight later I was at Zagreb airport with six hours to kill; no lounge, no seating and no check in. A five hour flight stopped in an unnamed country, another thirteen hours to Melbourne, twenty-six minutes from the tarmac through customs and border control and I was on a mad dash home before it got dark on Friday night. I only just made it.
And Back Again…
June 15, 2016
A year and six months later I decided I had too many stories to stop there. Given the wealth of experiences I’ve missed, my aim is to attempt to slowly fill in the missing days in no particular order.
May 18th 2016, I and the glee club departed for what would be my third tour with the group. This was to be my last with the group of people with whom I had joined the glee club and it was thus bittersweet. Additionally, I was coming to realize that tour placed a lot of pressure on me PhD wise and thus I was planning on re-evaluating my ability to go the next year.
Following a very late meeting with Nadia that morning, I arrived home just past midnight, packed my bags and was able to gain around two hours of sleep before awaking for a trip to Philadelphia International Airport. All suited up, this was the glee club’s first year in formal travel wear. While there were some grumbles, I quite enjoyed looking good for my flight. The first leg was to Atlanta, where we would transit on our way to Nashville, and subsequently on our way to every other destination. Needless to say, I don’t feel the need to visit that airport ever again.
Arriving in Nashville marked my first experience of the American South. While the hostel felt no different from a hostel anywhere else, the street outside betrayed a unique culture. While I can’t generalize beyond the touristy areas I visited, my feeling was that I was in a completely different country to the one I had spent the last few years in. Stores selling boots, southern BBQ joints, and life country music filled the footpaths.
The start of the afternoon was spent recovering on our sleep debt from that day, however soon enough we were on our way for some sightseeing. First up: the Tennessee State House.
The interior was quite beautifully designed with large marble columns framing wide open corridors that echoed with our footsteps. We performed briefly for our tour guide and while our music selection was questionable (a South African Folk Song, Bawo Tixo Somandla), the tone was sonorous.
The next day, I and a few others went to explore Vanderbilt University and the surroundings. One very notable structure there was a full sized replica of the Parthenon of Athens. While the exterior was impressive, elements of the interior were as amusing as they were impressive. A reconstruction of a statue of Athena stood prominently inside, and while the scale was large, the colors were somewhat garish. Furthermore during construction, funding had run out and thus the columns were not marble but concrete.
Walking along the path, going into second hand bookshops, we enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. We came upon an artisan coffee shop and spent a good half hour inside as the owner explained to us many of life’s mysteries and how coffee was a universal force that contained the essence of all nature, captured in the water, condensed from the seas and made from atoms from inside stars.
Evenings in Nashville were spent on Broadway, a street with many bars and live music out of every corner. The greatest appeal for me however, lay in Harmony Hall, the headquarters of the Barbershop Harmony Society (formerly SPEBSQUSA, the Society for the Promotion and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America). There I and the Penn Pipers were treated to both a tour, an a brief lesson singing barbershop ‘tags’. While we were disappointed that a lack of funding had caused the organization to condense its plans for a museum, both Dan Carsello and I enjoyed thoroughly being in the home of the art that we so love.
My last day in Nashville was a Shabbat and thus spent in bed with The Wheel of Time, a book series that I was and am thoroughly enjoying. A 14-book, 12-thousand page high fantasy epic of Rand Al’Thor’s fight against the Shadow Reborn.
New Orleans was hot and humid. A city of jazz and blues, a city of death and rebirth. I keeping with themes of death and rebirth, the glee club went on a ghost tour of New Orleans. Not quite my style but a gentle introduction to the city nonetheless. Our time in New Orleans was punctuated by burst of singing, a beautiful hostel with a questionable library, “tacos and beer”, and for me, plenty of time with my good friend Evan Weinstein.
One sight I visited with Evan that I thoroughly enjoyed was the National WWII Museum, formerly the D-Day Museum. The exhibits were spectacularly put together and gave me insight into the progression of the war in both the European and Pacific fronts. I came away both enriched in knowledge and with a sense for what makes the USA worth fighting for. In the photos below, one I’d draw attention to is the swastika, captured by the Americans on the capture of Italy and defaced with the names of the capturing troops.
The highlight of New Orleans (and of the entire trip) was for me, an encounter with a travelling performer in a caravan. While I can’t recall her name, I can recall the stunning ambience created by her performance from a piano in the corner of her small abode. She sang wistfully songs that connected to emotions the bystanders asked her to portray and served drinks from her diminutive bar mounted on the side.
Following New Orleans, and as an interlude to our regular tour activities came a weekend retreat in Key West, Miami. A beach side town featuring the southernmost point, the southernmost restaurant, the southernmost house, the southernmost artist… well you get the idea…. of the continental United States. Key West was heavily populated by chickens almost as much as people and many clustered around the start of Route 1 USA where a few of us took photos.
Much of our time was spent exploring the town, but the highlight for most glee clubbers, was the ocean cruise. A few hours on a boat with an open bar and a chance to sing for bridesmaids on a hen’s night more than excited a few of our members.
Shabbat was again spent on the adventures of Rand Al’Thor, before leaving subsequently for Miami Beach. Our final concert, in Miami, took place outside on a beautiful day, in a park along the ocean, and gave the seniors and I a chance to reminisce over our years together. It wasn’t long until the sombre mood wore off and we exploring again the boulevards of the city. I again spent much of my time with Evan, sneaking into fancy hotels, eating ice-cream and getting up to general mischief on foot.
All of a sudden tour was over, and I was back at Penn, moving all my items from my old room on the first floor of McIlhenny, Riepe (more on that later), to the third floor of Warwick in preparation for spending a year on ISP. ISP is the Integrated Studies Program, an interdisciplinary residential and curricular program for undergraduate students at Penn, and for 2016 I was to be one of the incoming students many mentors. After moving my stuff, I spent a few days more in the lab, before once again jetsetting. This time for Croatia.