Blog Archives: October, 2003
Jack’s Tours
Kilauea Iki Crater from Kilauea Iki Overlook At the beginning of this past summer, I received an email from Jack’s Tours in Hawai’i asking to use one of my photographs from Hawai’i on their website. And now it’s up! How cool is that?
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Early to rise
It is now my opinion that the adage “Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise” is false.
Evidence: I had to get early this morning for a Applied Probability tutorial.
Result:
- healthy: I am now coming down with a cold, which only started to manifest itself after the tutorial.
- wealthy: With international student tuition at Oxford with the US Dollar at its lowest rate compared to the Pound in the last ten years, wealthy? I think not!
- wise: According to this study, recently published in a highly respected serial, grad school actually makes you dumber.
The alternative conclusion would be that statistics is bad for your health, but I’m scared of what will happen to me if I make that conclusion.
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Bowie to Glass to Techno
I’m currently listenting to a track from an album called 26 Mixes For Cash by a techno artist named Aphex Twin. The track is called “Heroes”. In a very peculiar confluence of genres and artists, it’s a techno remix by Aphex Twin of a Philip Glass symphony called “Heroes” based on a David Bowie track of the same name. And it’s awesome!
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Paris and London
Notre Dame de Paris, from the south I’ve finally managed to sort through nearly 400 raw photographs from my trips to Paris and London, label them, and put together a few of the ones that I think are decent. The galleries are online: Paris and London. Warning: there are a lot of photos!
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New Sarah! Finally!
Sarah McLachlan Afterglow cover Gee, it’s only been six years since her last original album, but it appears that there will finally be a new Sarah McLachlan album! Entitled Afterglow, it will apparently be released on November 4, 2003. And if you happen to have Apple iTunes and are in the US, you can download it and other exclusive Sarah music: 
Start the countdown!
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NDSS Paper
Just a brief note to say that a paper I coauthored this past summer while at Sun Labs has been accepted to a conference. The paper, “Speeding up Secure Web Transactions using Elliptic Curve Cryptography”, has been accepted to The Eleventh Annual Symposium on Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) 2004, which will be held in San Diego in February. I won’t be attending, but a coauthor from the Labs will be. You can download the paper from my website.
The abstract of the paper:
Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is emerging as an attractive alternative to traditional public-key cryptosystems (RSA, DSA, DH). ECC offers equivalent security with smaller key sizes resulting in faster computations, lower power consumption, as well as memory and bandwidth savings. While these characteristics make ECC especially appealing for mobile devices, they can also alleviate the computational burden on secure web servers.
This article studies the performance impact of using ECC with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), the dominant Internet security protocol. We benchmark the Apache web server with an ECC-enhanced version of OpenSSL under a variety of conditions. Our results show that an Apache web server can handle 11%-31% more HTTPS requests per second when using ECC rather than RSA at short-term security levels. At security levels necessary to protect data beyond 2010, the use of ECC over RSA improves server performance by 110%-279% under realistic workloads.
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Learning polo
Ready to play polo This afternoon I joined the MBA class from the Saïd Business School at Oxford on a polo training outing. One of the members of my MCR at Pembroke, Pippa Grace, is president of the International Womens Polo Association; her family has for years been teaching people of all skill levels (including such neophytes as myself) to play polo at their Ascot Park Polo Club.
We went through various practical training segments: crates (where we stand on a crate and practice hitting a polo ball with a polo stick), horses (where we practice riding our mount; mine was named Norway), short sticks (where we play polo without horses), and theory (where we learn the rules and tactics of polo). Today was my first time riding a horse, but Norway was a good horse and responded well to my commands, although he didn’t want to accelerate when I wanted to; perhaps he knew better! The more successful riders in the practical session were chosen to play in two chukkas (a chukka is a 7-minute round of polo; there are 4 or 6 in a competition). Although I was not chosen to play in a match, I still had a wonderful time.
Pippa Grace on a polo pony Interesting things I learned today: in a match, players switch horses every chukka, or even during a chukka, so most teams (of four) have about 18 horses for a single match; a team is usually formed of two professionals, one non-professional (but still good) player, and the patron, the person who pays for the whole team, but may not be any good him/herself. I also learned that my friend Pippa has a 1 handicap (on a scale of -2 to 10). There’s only one woman player in the world with a 4 handicap, and around 2 dozen with handicaps 2 and 3, so she’s quite good. In a bit of cross-referencing, it was Pippa who took the photos of me from yesterday’s matriculation ceremony and who suggested we do tequila shots afterwards. Ahem.
(Interesting) things I did not learn today: more details about Markov chains, part of the work I should have done for my Applied Probability course. But it’s okay, statistics aren’t important.
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NSS Check-in
(Wow, three entries in one day, that’s a new record!)
I’m proud to report that a large chunk of the work I was doing this past summer at Sun Labs has gone public. Specifically, our code contributions have been checked in to the Netscape Security Services part of the open source project Mozilla.
Our new elliptic curve cryptography code offers greatly improved performance and improves the support for protocols based on ECC on the server side. What this all means is that, thanks in part to the work of my colleagues at Sun Labs and the work of various people in the open source community, there is now an end-to-end solution for using elliptic curve cryptography to secure web traffic. You can use a Mozilla client to talk to an Apache server with OpenSSL (or a SunONE server with the new NSS code).
More information: the newsgroup posting announcing the contribution; documentation for part of the contribution; Netscape Security Services project.
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