In fall of 2021 I had the pleasure of taking an graduate cryptography class with UCLA’s finest professor Rafail Ostrovsky. The whole class was fascinating, I did not realize how deep cryptography could go until that class, but one of the more fascinating topics was that of Multi Party Computation (MPC). The idea isn’t too difficult, a secret is “split up” between a …

I first learned about the RSA algorithm in high school. The actual computation wasn’t difficult to understand, but the fact that it worked seemed magical. I spent a good year trying to understand it back then and even then I only in college ended up figuring it out to any level of confidence. The beautiful simplicity of the algorithm was one of the things that got me into cryptography in …

Ever since taking UCLA’s computer architecture class (CS33) I was curious why loop tiling worked. Loop tiling is a tactic used to speed up matrix multiplication, apparently running matrix multiplication in a weird order somehow speeds up the multiplication because cache? It was a bit odd as it was the first and only time I really found a need for cache conscious programming. I implemented …