Thanks @uwcheritoncs.bsky.social

ACM invited our ACM CCS 2025 paper BLACKOUT (led by my student Hossam ElAtali and our collaborators at Ericsson, Merve Gülmez and Thomas Nyman) to be featured in the ACM Kudos Showcase. Congratulations Hossam, Merve, and Thomas!

link.growkudos.com/1dxqtlm0k5c

Making Software Both Memory-Safe and Leak-Proof: Introducing BLACKOUT Two major challenges stand in the way of protecting critical software like cryptographic libraries that secure websites, messaging apps, and...

On Wednesday, at ACM CCS, my student Hossam will be presenting BLACKOUT, a hardware-software codesign to simultaneously provide memory safety and data-oblivious execution. Work done with Ericsson experts Merve Gülmez & my former student Thomas Nyman.

Blog post at crysp.uwaterloo.ca/ssg/blog/202...

My student Anudeep Das initiated this work when he was an undergrad researcher. With doctoral students @vasishtduddu.bsky.social & Rui Zhang, he worked relentlessly and has won a best paper award. This is rare, even in a place like @uwcheritoncs.bsky.social with high-achieving undergrads!

I heard that some people found it difficult to navigate the medium . com link I sent above. So here is a pdf version as an alternative. drive.google.com/file/d/1boCI...

Please let me know if you have trouble accessing this version.

Promises and pitfalls of technological revolutions I was asked to give a short “morning assembly talk” at my high school. I decided to take the notes I wrote up in preparation into this blog…

Today, I was asked to speak at the morning assembly at my old high school, Trinity College - Kandy, Sri Lanka. This is what I said: medium.com/@asokan.publ...

The "Grad Conference" organized by CPI (cpi.uwaterloo.ca) and GSPA @uwaterloo.ca is about to begin. It is a first of a kind event bringing together #cybersecurity and #privacy grad students and industry from this region.

I wanted to post a link to this article because I thought it is one worth reading. Surprisingly, Bluesky keeps getting "Internal error!"

Facebook doesn't allow Canadians to post articles to newspapers or magazines.

So I am reduced to posting it on X and linking to it!
x.com/asokan_int/s...

*January 2025

@vajra.me's website now has the full text of my #Tamil translation of his #SF story “The Translator, At Low Tide” which appeared in the January 2024 issue of the Tamil literary magazine, kalachuvadu.

Earlier, I wrote about my experience in doing this translation at medium.com/@asokan.publ...

Vasisht Duddu awarded 2024 IBM PhD Fellowship | Cheriton School of Computer Science | University of Waterloo A news article about Vasisht Duddu, who was awarded an IBM PhD Fellowship

Congratulations @vasishtduddu.bsky.social first among my students to bag an #IBM PhD Fellowship. cs.uwaterloo.ca/news/vasisht...

Have you noticed any other such recent terminology transmogrification?

"Adversarial attacks" betray either laziness or carelessness. "Adaptive attacker" is now one who is unaware of the defense it is trying to defeat (Kerckhoff spinning in his grave), and not one who adapts the attack strategy based on the responses of the target system.

Allow me a rant: the security/crypto community has had to swallow terminology imposed from the outside, like "crypto" changing from "cryptology" to "crypto currencies" or the domain becoming "cybersecurity" (or even "cyber", ugh!). It is happening again in the ML security/privacy space.

The challenge is that before I can make my translations of #Moomin stories available, I need to find a Tamil #publisher who can obtain translation rights from the rights holder.

If you are or know a #Tamil publisher interested in publishing #Tove #Jansson stories in Tamil, please let me know.

About translations into Tamil: (a more detailed post here: medium.com/@e_iniyavan/...)

I posted about translating @vajra.me's fabulous story. 👇🏾

Next, I would love to translate #Tove #Jansson's #Moomin stories into #Tamil. Here is a writeup on my earlier attempt medium.com/@e_iniyavan/...

eḻuttukkiṉiyavaṉ / எழுத்துக்கினியவன் – Medium Read writing from eḻuttukkiṉiyavaṉ / எழுத்துக்கினியவன் on Medium. Technologist with a latent passion for writing, language and literature. மொழி, இலக்கியம், எழுத்துகளில் ஆர்வங்கொண்ட தொழில்நுட்பவியலாளர்...

If you are or know a publisher who might be interested in publishing any of these collections, please let me know.

All individual stories were posted on medium.com/@e_iniyavan; some appeared in the online magazine Jaffna Monitor.

Some notes on my Tamil->English translations: (a more detailed post here medium.com/@e_iniyavan/...)

3 full collections here drive.google.com/drive/folder...

1. Akka by A. Muttulingam
2. Lines and forms Kuppilan Ai. Shanmugan. and
3. Black Cuckoo, by Shobhasakthi

Thanks for re-sharing!

On my phone (Android) I use Gboard with தமிழ் (இலங்கை). It is not phonetic, but it supports word prediction, so that I don't often have to finish typing the entire word.

On desktops, I use the phonetic keyboard (e.g., on Windows, "Tamil (India) phonetic") so that I can type phonetically or cut-and-paste from www.google.com/inputtools/t... and cut-and-paste.

Beware that phonetic keyboards assume an "English" transliteration scheme!

Sri Lankan Science Fiction When I was fourteen, my parents decided to move to a Christian mission school. Back then the medium of instruction for most Sri Lankan…

I wrote up a personal reminiscence of the dramatic rise of Science Fiction in Sri Lanka (and how I ended up translating a short story by a top writer, Nebula-winner @vajra.me, into Tamil which was just published by Kalachuvadu, a leading Tamil literary magazine).

medium.com/@asokan.publ...