Hi everyone! Now that I’ve settled into my routine here, I thought I’d share a little bit about what my work life is like.
Before arriving in China, I was not oblivious to the ironic situation I was going to be in: I was going to be studying cryptography, the science of creating secure techniques for communication in the presence of third parties, in the heart of China, a country vilified for hacking allegations. I thought it would be an absolutely unique experience: learning and working on making machines hacker-proof in the middle of a country reputed to be the world’s hacker haven. And it definitely is!
My mentor, Professor John Steinberger, is an extremely interesting figure: he is definitely a global citizen. He has studied both in America and Canada, and is now working in China. In addition, he is fluent in Chinese, a fact that I hope to replicate for myself in the coming years. What fascinated me the most about him was that he was an American working in a Chinese University to further the field of cryptography, which given the hacking allegations that have taken place, I believe represents a unique display of international friendship.
I am working at Tsinghua’s IIIS (Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences) in the FIT (Future of Information Technology) Building. My initial nervousness vanished when Ms. Yu Ying warmly introduced me to the college/graduate/postdoc etc. students working at the IIIS. Much to my surprise, in the surrounding cubicles were four American and one Canadian undergraduate students: in addition to the other Chinese students, these five students have been making me feel right at home.
In addition to learning from Professor Steinberger about cryptography, I have begun pursuing a project that ties into his expertise, but branches out into a different field of math. Instead of dealing directly with a cryptographic application, I studied one of the most essential processes that directly enables cryptographic functions: random number generation. Strong random number generation is essential in order to encrypt anything successfully; anything encrypted requires a key in order to be decrypted, so it’s essential that an attacker does not know the key. If one could perfectly generate random numbers, it would be virtually impossible for an attacker to figure out the key, and as a result, the encrypted information would be safe, unless the attacker attempted another type of attack. Unfortunately, perfect random number generation is impossible, as computers and other devices can only create a pseudorandom number, usually dictated by a complex formula, but nevertheless an often predictable one. Computers also use noise, or any other type of easily accessible external source of entropy, to generate random numbers, but even this method can be easy for an attacker to crack.
That’s why I am planning to use a portable chip, specifically, the Invensense MPU-9250, which has an accelerometer to measure acceleration, and a gyroscope and compass to measure direction, each on all three axes. Even though it’s impossible to generate perfectly random numbers, I am hypothesizing that devices like accelerometers, contained on all smartphones, as well as on the wearable technology of the future, would exhibit a high level of entropy, in essence a measure of randomness, thus strengthening random number generation and making an attacker’s job much more difficult. As I make progress on my project I’ll be sure to continue updating you all on my project!
Otherwise, my time in China has been lots of fun. I absolutely love the food: I’ve always been adventurous with my food, and China is definitely an exciting place to let my taste buds explore! I’ve slowly started making a dent in all the tourist spots in the city: Beijing is chock full of historic spots, and I’m excited to continue visiting them.
As always, please feel free to message me if you have any questions! I would love to hear from all of you.
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