[tor-reports] Isis, June 2013

[isis agora lovecruft]

# -*- mode: org ; coding: utf-8 -*-

*** status report 2013/06
**** research

I read several papers in an attempt to determine the best mechanism for social
bridge distribution from the current academic literature proposing various
such schema. I think that rBridge is the best social bridge distribution
scheme proposed so far (with some various caveats). [0]

I also read several crypto papers in order to better understand the
cryptographic primitives and schema used in Part V (the privacy preserving
variant of the rBridge system) of the rBridge paper. [1]

I read some crypto papers. [2] [3]

Then there was an accident where I wound up with endophthalmitis in my left
eye, which had previously been my good one since the other was already pretty
bad. The physicians at the emergency room told me the first day (incidentally,
my birthday) that I had a very good chance of losing it. In the past I've said
that I would drown myself if I ever lost my eyes or my hands, but,
surprisingly, I was all for the idea of having the eye removed, it hurt so
badly. The second two weeks of June were spent mostly on heavy narcotics with
my eye taped shut and patched. I got pretty good at typing blind (even
coding!) without mistakes, opening my right eye once in a while to double
check that the terminal in my head actually matched the one on the
screen. Homemade window manager with keybindings for everything, #FTW.

I also learned that I must appear frightening with an eyepatch, because I was
able to go into very fancy restaurants and cafés and demand things, like
glasses of tap water, with the response, "Yes, miss. Of course. Right away."
And then it actually *was* right away. (Which was infinitely entertaining at
the time.)

Still, the inability to do much of anything useful was sheer hell. Several
other Tor developers were wonderful and sweet, sending audiobooks and mixed
tapes, offering to call me on the telephone from halfway across the world to
read to me, giving me ridiculous anime character eyepatches (that person is
actually a certain Cryptocat developer), and manually typing out explanations
of cryptopapers which only exist in Postscript (and thus aren't very friendly
to people who need TTS). Also, if someone were ever to come up with a good way
to do TTS for LaTeX equations, they would do the world an invaluable favour.

[0]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/7520#comment:14
[1]: Naor, Moni, and Benny Pinkas. "Computationally secure oblivious transfer."
       Journal of Cryptology 18.1 (2005): 1-35.
       http://logic.pdmi.ras.ru/ics/papers/ot.pdf
[2]: Tzeng, Wen-Guey. "Efficient 1-out-n oblivious transfer schemes."
       Public Key Cryptography. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2002.
       http://www.csie.nuk.edu.tw/~cychen/quantum/OT%20and%20QOT/OT/Efficient%20Oblivious%20Transfer%20Schemes%20(2001).pdf
[3]: Au, Man Ho, et al.
       "Dynamic universal accumulators for DDH groups and their application to attribute-based anonymous credential systems."
       Topics in Cryptology–CT-RSA 2009. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2009. 295-308.
       http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=9405&context=infopapers

-- 
 ♥Ⓐ isis agora lovecruft
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