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September 16, 2005
Reports of it's demise have been greatly exaggerated
Between 2002 and 2004, I had the opportunity to pursue a MS in Computer Science.
This is not news to most.
My thesis was titled A Scalable Architecture for Public Key Distribution Acting in Concert with DNS. The basic problem is that cryptography is great for protecting information, but it requires that both sides have the appropriate key(s).
Actually distributing keys is one of those problems that difficult to the point that most conversations about cryptography gloss over it. I decided to try and attack it by using the name service that lets your browser figure out where on the network "www.reversecurve.org" is located.
My advisor supported my work, but never showed too much interest. It was an engineering exercise - focused on providing a practical solution to an open problem. Academics, on the other hand, are just as interested in defining their own problems to solve. It's easier to be the "top in your field" if you defined the field.
After my thesis, we turned that 100 page document into a 15 page paper and submitted it to a couple of conferences. It was rejected (at one point it was rejected for being too well written - I kid you not). I had run out of time at the university, so I figured it was destined to be yet another thesis gathering dust on a shelf somewhere. We turned it into a technical report, and that, as they say, was that.
A couple months back I got an email from my advisor that we were accepted to ACSAC 2005; which was pretty cool. Though the interesting part was neither my co-author nor I had submitted it.
Seems my advisor had done an edit pass and submitted the paper, and this time, no one complained that it was too well written. (I'm sure there wasn't a causal relationship...)
So John (my co-author, who was instrumental in turning my thesis prototype into something that could actually scale to handle Internet-scale loads) and I spent a bit of time over the last several weeks whipping the paper into shape. Ravi (my advisor) did his last edit pass the other day, and John submitted the final version this morning.
Posted by dberger at September 16, 2005 10:10 AM
Comments
Good luck with that!
Posted by: Cath at September 16, 2005 2:10 PM