(March 23, 2023)

I am a professor of computer science and a researcher in the field of applied cryptography. On a day-to-day basis this means that I work on the design of encryption systems. Most of what I do involves building things: I design new encryption systems and try to make existing encryption technologies more useful.

Sometimes I and my colleagues also break encryption systems. I wish I could tell you this didn’t happen often, but it happens much more frequently than you’d imagine, and often in systems that have billions of users and that are very hard to fix. Encryption is a very exciting area to work in, but it’s also a young area. We don’t know all the ways we can get things wrong, and we’re still learning.