Author: Michael

Cracked encryption by listening to computer’s CPU

An interesting article pointed out to me by Zhizhao Qian:

Security researchers have successfully broken one of the most secure encryption algorithms, 4096-bit RSA, by listening – yes, with a microphone — to a computer as it decrypts some encrypted data. The attack is fairly simple and can be carried out with rudimentary hardware. The repercussions for the average computer user are minimal, but if you’re a secret agent, power user, or some other kind of encryption-using miscreant, you may want to reach for the Rammstein when decrypting your data.

via Researchers crack the world’s toughest encryption by listening to the tiny sounds made by your computer’s CPU | ExtremeTech.

Modern Chairs

There is an interesting article about the role of Chairs in the December issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. The position of a modern Chair includes, beside the standard academic duties, new duties that traditionally belonged to middle management: coordinating assessments and accreditations, fund raising, contacts with industry, etc.

Chairs are put in this difficult position where they are held accountable for documenting that their programs are succeeding, that their faculty are succeeding, and that they’re staying in budget,” says Mr. Buller, author of several books on academic administration. “We’re seeing a professionalization of higher-education administration—and that’s not such a bad thing. Because the faculty position itself has changed and because we have an accountability culture in higher education, you need people who have managerial training to serve as chair.

The article can be found here:

http://chronicle.com/article/Department-Chairs-Find/143309/

STEM graduate shortage? Computer science is where the future jobs are

This is an article written for The Seattle Times by Edward D. Lazowska, an alumnus of McMaster University; here is one excerpt, and see below for the rest of the article: 

… nationwide there is a well-documented shortage of graduates in computer science. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that 70 percent of all new jobs across all STEM fields during this decade, across engineering, the physical sciences, the life sciences, and the social sciences, will be in computer science. More than three-quarters of a million new jobs. The field is booming.

via Guest: STEM graduate shortage? Computer science is where the future jobs are | Opinion | The Seattle Times.

Ariel Fernández Ph.D.

My Ph.D. student, Ariel Fernández, has successfully defended his thesis on June 10, 2013: Formalizing Combinatorial Matrix Theory.

The results of that thesis were presented at two conferences:

How hard in unshuffling a square?

A shuffle of two strings is formed by interspersing the characters into a new string, keeping the characters of each string in order. For example, MISSISSIPPI is a shuffle of MISIPP and SSISI. Lets call a string a square if it is a shuffle of two identical strings.

In November 2012, Sam Buss and I have succeeded in proving that the problem of determining whether a string can be written as a square shuffle is NP complete. This applies even over a finite alphabet with only 7 distinct symbols, although our proof is written for an alphabet with 9 symbols. This question is still open for smaller alphabets, say with only 2 symbols.

This problem was first posted on the CS Theory Community Blog in August of 2010. The problem received a lot of attention at the Theoretical Computer Science StackExchange. Our solution has been published in December 2013, the Journal of Computer and System Sciences:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002200001300189X

(here is the corresponding StackExchange post)

Making the Web Faster with HTTP 2.0 – ACM Queue

A modern Web application looks significantly different from a decade ago. According to HTTP Archive,6 an average Web application is now composed of more than 90 resources, which are fetched from more than 15 distinct hosts, totaling more than 1,300 KB of (compressed) transferred data. As a result, a large fraction of HTTP data flows consist of small (less than 15 KB), bursty data transfers over dozens of distinct TCP connections. Therein lies the problem. TCP is optimized for long-lived connections and bulk data transfers. Network RTT (round-trip time) is the limiting factor in throughput of new TCP connections (a result of TCP congestion control), and consequently, latency is also the performance bottleneck for most Web applications.

via Making the Web Faster with HTTP 2.0 – ACM Queue.