I want to make a thread, that I will maybe convert into a blog post, of cryptography things that I have found really hard to google.

🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱 Polish benchmark 🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱 RAAAAA 🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱

this week is my 1 year anniversary of starting grad school. I have been reading 1-2 papers (or equivalent amount of a textbook) per week most of the time. here is the list of papers i have read since starting. I am pretty proud of it! here is a list of papers that were highlights:

writing "i.e.g." to hedge my bets against using the wrong acronym

i now realize that this reviewer (who bid for an applied crypto paper) does not seem to know what a commitment scheme or PRF is, in addition to probably asking us to cite their paper

working through updating my paper based on the reviews, and one of the reviewers almost certainly asked me to cite their (superficially looks related but isn't) paper

ticketmaster is officially headquartered in West Virginia? kind of interesting

got my first conference rejections (2 for S&P).

one of my hobbies is reading crank papers on eprint.iacr.org. Most AI-generated papers seem to exist to try to fool other people, but a scary number of them seem to involve somebody being convinced they have made a major discovery by an LLM

i wish i was over 6 feet tall so i could use the "long fellow" crypto library :( github.com/google/longf...

the billing code for shoulder pain is 25.519! cryptography is everywhere!

im working on my first 2 subreview papers ever! both are pretty good papers! it is giving me optimism about the state of the field

I wrote a blog post about some (hopefully non-obvious) thoughts about the differences between big tech and academia: www.sasha.place/blog/2025/06...

I really liked this blog post explaining this internet math meme from a few years ago vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025...

solving the poop equation tonight

How to Trace Viral Content in End-to-End Encrypted Messaging (Pedro Branco, Matthew Green, Aditya Hegde, Abhishek Jain, Gabriel Kaptchuk) ia.cr/2025/1052

submitted to S&P

4 days to IEEE S&P deadline. stuck in the phase of paper writing where people keep asking me to slightly change the intro and framing paragraphs of various sections.

It's a week left until the IEEE S&P deadline and this video's (youtu.be/H2Mb-0QrYw0?...) idea of the "finishing gulch" really resonated with me. "I've been working on a thing for weeks [...] Every clever line is stale. Every interesting fact that pulled me into the story is something that I've just

when overleaf hits you with the big-ass f

i asked a question on stackoverflow for the first time in a few years and pretty soon after people swooped in on my post to do random copy editing?? what are we doing here

new blog post about optimizing code for zkVMs! www.sasha.place/blog/2025/03... would appreciate any feedback!

i recently gave a talk at the UMD crypto reading group about Binius (eprint.iacr.org/2023/1784), a notoriously hard to understand paper. a few people asked me for advice on how to work up to understanding it. here is my attempt at explaining a "binius reading list":

the opposite of the denominator is the nominator. didn't know i missed that part of fractions in elementary school

"the brains of fruit flies use bloom filters" is apparently a true fact from this paper: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

new salvo in the war for the 16 GB of RAM on my laptop: my VSCode installed an AI spellcheck thing when I blindly clicked on "install suggested extensions" for something. Each window I had open spawned a process just called `java` that was using ~500 MB of RAM!! 1.5 GB across all my windows.

fastest bug experience i have ever had: i was playing around with the lattice estimator for the first time, the third thing i tried caused a bug (lattice over ed25519 field), my bug was fixed within an hour! github.com/malb/lattice...

interesting bad API design I saw in plonky2: Plonky2 defines this QuadraticExtension struct for quadratic extensions of fields. it is important for security because the default field is Goldilocks (63 bits) and you need to sample random points from a quadratic extension field to have enough entropy

One of my favorite internal Meta engineering stories is finally public! There was a 1 character commit that resulting in saving many millions of dollars a year of server capacity. engineering.fb.com/2025/01/21/p... (under the heading "The Biggest Ampersand")

something i don't like about working in Rust: people love giving their crates weird punny/silly names and there are often a bunch of crates imported per project, so part of reading a new project's code is keeping all the weird jokes in your head. i feel like i've never seen anybody bring this up

I wrote up a note with some new ZK RAM tricks that I came up as "side results" from a project. Hopefully they are an interesting addition to the literature!

I made a blog post! Inspired by @soatok.bsky.social ! It's about 2 ideas for applications of zero-knowledge proofs that I think are totally new: www.sasha.place/blog/2024/12...

google thinks that one of the important statistics about Sofia Bulgaria is when it was conquered by Krum

2024 update for my chart on the landscape of quantum computing: sam-jaques.appspot.com/quantum_land... Not much visible on the chart, but Google's result (the one with the recent press attention) is a pretty big deal

guy in front of me in quantum computing class takes notes by opening up a Notion note and writing down like 4 bullet points per class. this is a class where the professor writes equations on the whiteboard for the entire class.