Well, hello everybody. My name is Mark Handbelt. I'm the Associate Dean for Students in Enrollment here in the Faculty of Public Affairs. Welcome to our information session on CUROV. I'm going to sort of say a little bit about the program. I'm not going to talk for very long. And then really the point of this is just to open this up for questions and to give you an opportunity to ask any questions that you have about this program. And if you want to, there's sort of several ways you can ask questions. You can either turn on your camera and ask the question yourself or if you want to put it in the chat function. I think Stephanie who's monitoring this can monitor the chat function and we can have questions that way. So it's however your most comfortable. But I just wanted to say that I mean CUROV is a program that I'm really excited about. I've had the opportunity to serve as a CUROV supervisor before where a student who worked with me was successful in getting a CUROV internship I should say. And now as Associate Dean this is a program that falls within my portfolio. And it really is an exciting program because when it does it offers you the opportunity to design a research project on your own and then to have the opportunity through the summer to pursue that project under the guidance of a supervisor. And of course also to receive a stipend to do that. So you have the opportunity basically to devote yourself full time for those four months to a research project of your own design. I think it's really exciting that way. So what I wanted to do is I wanted to talk through basically an overview of the program. Then I'll talk a little bit about finding a supervisor. And then I will talk a little bit about the proposal, the one page proposal that you need to submit as part of your application. And when I'm done with that we'll open it up to questions. So as a general overview of the program what happens is you need to submit an application this month. So the deadline for applications is February the 28th. All of this information is on the CUROP website. So you can get it there quite easily. But what you need to submit you need to submit a one page proposal for your project. Also your CV, your transcript and your supervisor will submit a letter of reference on your behalf. Those candidates who are successful will have the opportunity to do their project basically between May and August. So you have that four month window there. And the idea is that this is a project that you would devote yourself to full time. So it's really a full-time research project. And as I said at the beginning or as I'm sure you've seen on the website there is a stipend attached to this of $7,500 that you would receive throughout the summer. Once you get to the end of the summer and your research is complete there will be an output from your project and this will have been stipulated in your proposal. So some people might do a policy brief, some people might do a research paper, there's a range of different outputs that could come out of this. But what we ask you to submit in September is a two-page abstract of your completed research. So that we have a two-page abstract of what it is that you've completed over the summer, what it is that you've achieved. And then in the fall we hold our CuroP showcase. And the CuroP showcase is where you have the opportunity to invite friends and family and I'm there and the deans there and the faculty supervisors are there and it's a showcase event that where each of the CuroP researchers presents their work and presents their findings and then there's an opportunity for you to take questions from the audience and it's a really wonderful event. Under normal circumstances we like to do this in person. Of course we're operating under slightly different circumstances right now. So we held our CuroP showcase this year in the fall on Zoom and it was a very successful event. It was really exciting to hear about all these different projects and also for the supervisors to have the opportunity to speak about the students who'd worked with them. So that's basically the overview of the program, the applications this month, the research is conducted between May and August, in September you're submitting an abstract of what you've done and then we have this CuroP showcase in the fall that brings the program close. So one of the things that you are required to do as part of this is to find a faculty supervisor. For some people this is very easy and very obvious to do. For some people it can be more of a challenge. So what I would say, I mean the first thing is to recognize that while you certainly would look for a faculty supervisor who had research expertise in the field that you want to research, it's really important that the CuroP project is your project. This is a student-driven initiative and it's an undergraduate student-driven initiative. It's an opportunity for you to earn funding for your own research project. So you don't need to find a supervisor who necessarily works on exactly the same type of project that you work on. But you do want someone who has research expertise in the field who's able to give you guidance, both guidance in terms of conducting your so subject matter expertise. How do you go about finding a supervisor? Well sometimes you will have taken courses with someone who's a very obvious candidate as a supervisor and you can approach them. All of the departments have faculty webpages where faculty members have profiles and then those profiles will have mention of their research areas. You can look there. If you're still struggling you can contact the chair of the department and tell them you're interested in applying for CuroP and you're wondering if they have any suggestions of who you might approach as a faculty supervisor. When you approach a supervisor you know I think that there's sort of two things to keep in mind. One is that these are the kinds of projects that in general I think faculty members really enjoy working on. They really enjoy the opportunity to work with a student on a project the student is really excited about and the student has designed. But you want to make sure that your approach is somewhat structured right so you don't want to just send an email to a professor saying hey professor so-and-so I want to apply for CuroP will you be my supervisor. Much better to have something that you can show them to give them a clear sense of what it is that you want to do. So one suggestion would be to have a good draft of the one-page proposal that you can send to a supervisor and then you can say you know I'm considering applying for this funding opportunity here's a draft of the proposal that I'm interested in submitting would it be possible to meet to discuss this opportunity or do you have any suggestions. And if you approach the faculty member that way it gives the faculty member the opportunity to have some input into shaping your proposal so you're not telling them that here's my final proposal this is what I'm submitting you're you are looking for their guidance and I can certainly tell you that when I worked with a student in this program we did work together to hone the the proposal to to to get it to the point where where it was ultimately submitted. But it's a way of starting a conversation it's a way of telling a professor that you're really interested in their area of expertise that that you would like to do your own research in that area that you have some ideas about how the type of research you want to do so you're not just showing up you know sort of spitballing here you have you have some ideas about what you want to do but you're also really open to their input and their help in in terms of shaping the project. I'm sure that it can be intimidating to to send an email to a faculty member that you've never met. I think all that I can do on that front is is to try and reassure you that as faculty members you know these are the kinds of emails that we really enjoy receiving and these are the kinds of projects that or the kinds of programs that we really enjoy participating in and if what you're telling your supervisor is that you're really interested in their area of research and is something you'd like to pursue I don't think there are very many professors who are going to be at all put out by receiving that sort of email so you know have some confidence that that your your professors will will receive these sorts of applications they may not be able to supervise you they may not you know they may not have the time to do available they may be too booked to do it but but certainly the the request will be well received. Okay the last thing I wanted to talk about was the proposal and and writing these proposals can be a challenge and you know I can tell you that many graduate students even many faculty members struggle sometimes with writing these kinds of research proposals so there's no one model that works there are there are multiple ways of doing these types of proposals but I want to warn you against a couple of things and also give you some suggestions about how to think about writing a proposal. The key here is to remember that you have one page there's oftentimes a temptation I think to want to tell a long narrative about how you got to or how you arrived at your research interests and so there's a temptation to write you know ever since I was young I've been interested in X, Y and Z and then I went to high school and I had this professor and this professor was so influential and they had us do this project and I got more and more interested in the subject matter so when I came to university this was the first thing that I wanted to study and then I went well before you know it you're on to page six and you haven't even told your profile you haven't even started telling us what the proposal is bad so I strongly encourage you to avoid the long narrative you start at the end right you start with the punchline a professor of mine once told me when I was an undergraduate that the difference between academic writing and writing a mystery novel is that when you write a mystery novel and your reader gets partway through it and says wow this is fascinating I can't wait to find out how it ends up you've probably written a wonderful mystery novel and if you're writing an academic piece and your writer is halfway through it thinking wow this is fascinating I can't wait to find out how it ends you're probably a lot more trouble and I repeat that anecdote at nauseam to all of my students but I think it there's a lot of wisdom in it you need to give away the punchline right at the beginning you need to tell your your reader what this project is about right at the beginning and I think that there are three things that that you want to have really clear in your proposal the first is what is your question what is the research question that drives your project good scholarship is about questions it's not about answers so if you can defend your question at the beginning whatever the answer whatever the answer that comes out of your project is going to be valuable from a scholarly point of view if you can say here's a valuable question here's something that's worth asking then the answer whatever it is is going to be valuable so the three things that you want then very very clearly in your proposal are what is my question and you want your question phrased as precisely and as succinctly as possible secondly what is the significance of this question why is this an important question why should we care about the answer to this question what's at stake in answering this question and third what is your method and method very simply is how are you going to go about answering this question what's the method is you know method is a word that we get hung up on a lot but very simply method is how you do what you do so you're going to do something in this project how in as specific and precise terms as possible how are you going to do it when you're thinking about your project there there are sort of two polls that you want to stay in between on the one poll um is the question of significance right what's at stake here what's how how significant is this as a question but on the other side of that is feasibility are you able to get this project done in the four months that you have to get it done and where projects tend to go off the rails a little bit is when they fall too far to one side or the other of that spectrum so you know you could have the save the world kind of project a project that talks about all the ways in which you know studying this field is going to transform the ways in which human beings live on this earth and that would be wonderful except you have four months to get this done right and on the other side of the equation if you tend too far towards feasibility what you get is a project that is is laid out in very clear steps and you know absolutely this can get done in four months except the significance is so narrow and so fine that you have all of you know your readers looking at you saying well why are we asking this question why would this be worth doing um so you want to fall somewhere in the middle there you want to be able to say here's why this is significant here's what's at stake here but also here's my method in really clear terms and here's how I show that really I can get this done in the four months that I have to work and one of the things that I think is very helpful in thinking about how to navigate that is to think about this project as one project one step you know down a long road of the interests or or the the questions that drive you as a scholar so if you think about what are the big big questions that drive me as a scholar and think about that as sort of a big pie or a big circle right here here are the big questions and the questions we're talking about here you know questions that would take a lifetime of study to explore and at the end of the day you still wouldn't have a complete answer to but what are those big big questions that drive you as a scholar and then think about you know what's a really specific or precise wedge that I can drive into that one question that I can that I can ask that I can answer in a four month project that can take us some ways some step down the road towards answering those much much bigger questions I think if you think about your project that your proposal that way and think about it as that one step or that one little wedge that we're driving into this much bigger set of questions you can wind up with a proposal that's both manageable or feasible within that four month period but also has real significance and your reader can read your proposal and say okay I understand why we're doing this project I understand what we can start to better understand or what we can understand more fully or in a different light than we would have otherwise okay so that's about all that I have to say about the project the proposal sorry the program that's the word I was looking for that's what I have to say about the program as I say I think this is a really exciting program I'm really pleased to see you here interested in it and I am happy to take any questions that you have so you can either do those by by turning on your camera and asking the question or you can post something in the chat I will say that the the website that we have is is quite extensive and and answers I think a lot of questions about the program the one thing I would I would just flag for you and I only noticed it this morning is that there are a few errors in the frequently asked questions the FAQ section and those are just very small errors around the dates that the dates that are posted our last year's dates so just be careful with that but but apart from that there is a lot of information there okay I do have a question in the chat does the supervisor have to be part of the faculty public affairs no they don't you can have a faculty you can have a faculty member from another unit in the university they do have to be a permanent faculty member but the key is that you as a student your your eligibility is determined by your faculty okay another question and by the way I should also say to those of you who are posting in the chat if I don't answer your question fully or if somehow I've missed something please don't hesitate to add a question there to get me to expand next question is the program designed to be for students with previous formal research experience or is it designed for students with little or no previous experience the expectation here is that you've completed your second year of your undergraduate program so that is a certain amount of formal training but beyond that and beyond the minimum grade point average no there's no requirement that that you have previous experience as a paid researcher um so if you have questions about how to um how to formulate a research project or if you have questions about research methodologies those are questions that you can raise with your supervisor and those are the kinds of skills that you can develop through this program so one of the things that we're asking for as part of your proposal is that you talk about the skills that you will learn you will develop or you anticipate learning or developing through this program if for example you you know you you have an interest in going to graduate school and and you would like to do survey methodology but you've never done it before and there's a lot to learn there and this kind of program is is where you can start to develop some of those skills in conjunction with a supervisor okay I hope that answered that question okay the next question was about accomplishment but I think the answer the question is answered second year and the minimum GPA that's right how many students are selected in past years we've had 10 cure-up fellows how do you determine if a faculty member is permanent good question so sometimes it's more or less obvious on your on on a faculty page but there there are two sort of broadly speaking there are two categories of faculty members that we have at the university those who are hired to teach individual courses and those who are hired on a permanent basis and the people who are hired on a permanent basis will have a title like assistant professor or associate professor or professor so those are the people who you would need to approach as a potential supervisor and if you have questions about the status of a potential supervisor you can simply ask them they'll be able to answer that question for you to clarify do PhD candidates or associate professors count as full-time so associate professors do and PhD candidates do not so a permanent faculty member would be someone who is either as I said an assistant professor an associate professor or a professor so what do you suggest is the best strategy for approaching a faculty member so I think that the one of the one of the things that's challenging in the COVID environment is around communication right because we can't bump into people in hallways the way we're used to we don't there isn't that opportunity to speak to a professor briefly at the front of a lecture hall at the end of a class or to knock on their door during an office hour but the so we do have to do everything by email and and your approaches will be by email what I suggest is is that you approach a professor with a relatively short initial introduction it will depend of course on whether or not you're a previous or an existing relationship with that professor if you already know each other well that you're approaching a professor or with whom you've had very limited interaction or maybe you've never had any kind of sort of direct interaction you would want to send a brief email that introduces yourself it says you're you know you're interested in applying for a curop fellowship and or curop internship I should say and that you know you've you've read this this professor's faculty page or you know you've read something that they've written or or however it is that you've ascertained that you think this person would be a really good supervisor and you'd like to discuss with them the possibility of supervising your project as I said before I think I would include a draft of your proposal you send it to them and you ask you know would it be possible to meet via zoom or online to talk about this project and then you know you do have to wait a little bit the next question is sort of related to this thing I approached a few professors with a draft proposal but there's been no response I think there there's sort of two sides to answering that question on the one hand you know we do have to recognize that that everybody is working under very difficult circumstances right now and and sort of time pressures the amount of time that we're spending in front of our computers the amount of time that that we have to dedicate to email traffic so so I think that you know you have to be a little bit accommodating and allowing somewhat a little bit of time to read the proposal and to think about it but on the other hand you know you you as a student have have interests and that matter and there's also timelines that matter in terms of finding a supervisor so I would say that if you've if you've sent your proposal to a professor I would give them a reasonable amount of time to respond you know at least sort of I don't know three three four days maybe something like that if you haven't reserved a response at that point I think it's perfectly legitimate to send a follow-up email and say you know dear professor so-and-so I sent an email a few days ago with with my proposal for cure-up I was wondering if you'd have an opportunity if you've had an opportunity to to look it over I would really be interested in in meeting with you or talking with you about this opportunity of course professors have the opportunity have the option of saying no but you may well find that if professors have been unresponsive it's it has nothing to do with the quality of your proposal or their interest in supervising but is simply that that you know your email has been lost in the pile that has come in that day I would not be I would I would not suggest that you be too too accommodating I mean if you haven't heard from someone in a week I wouldn't expect that they are going to miraculously answer you you know a week and a half later I think I think if you've waited a reasonable amount of time you're perfectly entitled to or perfectly within your rights to just send them a follow-up email it's just just a short polite email to to ask if they've had a chance to read the proposal so next question if accept is something I can use on my resume yes absolutely and so so what you have here is something that's potentially I would think really valuable on a on a resume because this would be a proposal this would be a project that you had designed on your own and for which you had applied successfully for funding so so this is you know you would be able to say that as an undergraduate student you had successfully applied for funding for a research project of your own design which in the academic world is is a pretty significant accomplishment I don't see any other questions coming in let's see here the supervisor have to be from faculty public affairs no they do not so the supervisor can be from another faculty at the university your eligibility for the program is determined by your faculty so so you have to be a faculty of public affairs student to qualify but but you're welcome to work with a supervisor from a different faculty so if you've approached a few faculty members and you're not getting positive response I think the I think the next step would be to contact the chair or the director of your department and to ask them if they have any suggestions for faculty members who might be interested in or might be willing to supervise your project one of the things about the faculty profiles that we have online is that unfortunately they're not always up to date and there are times when faculty members you know either have new projects or their research has moved in a slightly different direction and that that change isn't entirely reflected in the faculty profile that they have posted so it's entirely possible that what you're interested in is something that there is someone in the department working on that it's just not as visible online so so there would be someone who who could certainly help to point you in a direction of someone who you could approach with that finding a supervisor I certainly recognize can be you know for some it's a very easy and very obvious choice and for some it requires more work to identify someone as a potential supervisor and then to approach them and then have them read your work and then agree to agree to be a supervisor so you know it it's I don't think that there's any one I don't think that there's any one way to be successful you know there is a certain element of you know be yourself in in in how you approach someone but also don't don't hesitate to be a little persistent because as I said it is it is a really good opportunity and you know it's you want to make sure that you get an answer from faculty members you approach and if they are going to say no that you have the opportunity to approach other people as for the content of the research does it need to be program related so I assume by that that you mean the program in which you're enrolled is that right so for example if you were doing a if you were doing a okay so so if you're doing a political science degree let's say does your does your research have to be in political science is that that's the question not necessarily no I mean that what's what's required is that what's required is that your what's required is that you be enrolled in a program in in in our faculty I think that I'm trying I'm trying to think how to answer this question most effectively because I mean there's a lot of work that can be very interdisciplinary and in that case you know it might not fall squarely or or or cleanly within any you know it might have elements of let's say economics and elements of political science in it that would be perfectly fine can I be supervised by professor outside of Carlton no you do need to have a Carlton University supervisor for the project if you don't mind mark there's a question here too who is the chair of the faculty of public affairs and what is that person's contact information it's from Melissa so what mark was talking about earlier is that the chair for the department they're all different sometimes it can be hard to determine you can look on the Carlton website but positions do change sometimes at the end of this call I'll be posting my information so if you need help with anything you could just email me and I can direct you accordingly yeah well that's that's great and each each unit in the faculty has its own website and has a contact section on the website and so if you're looking for you know the chair of economics or the director of social work or whatever it is they're they're identified on the website for each one of those units okay when we talk about faculty of public affairs we're talking about the faculty as a whole so the the the body that that contains within it all of these different units okay so such as the department of political science the department of economics the school of social work journalism and communications all of these units that are part of the faculty of public affairs um for example I mean economic oh so this was related to the subject matter so if you're in economics and and you want to do research that's not specifically within economics but you are a faculty of public affairs student sure you could you could you could propose a project with with a supervisor and and and apply absolutely yes and and for everyone here just just do make sure that you have a look in the chat function um Stephanie has just posted her contact information and if you have any questions at all um by all means you can contact Stephanie and if you can't access the chat Stephanie's the person that sent you the information for the zoom call so if you even even want to reply to that email that's perfectly fine there we go does anyone have any other questions are there any any other questions anything at all okay well um I hope that uh I mean I hope that you you are all leave this uh meeting motivated to apply I hope you all submit applications um like I said I I think this is a wonderful program and it's uh and really a wonderful opportunity I can tell you that that I I wish that there had been an opportunity like this when I was an undergraduate it uh it's pretty exciting so good luck to all of you um and as Stephanie said if you have any questions about the program please feel free to contact her um and she or I um will be able to get back to you with answers okay all right well have a great day everybody enjoy the rest of the day and like I said good luck with your applications


Hi, I am Gianluca Briane and I am presenting the mother of all leakages, how to simulate noisy leakages via bounded leakage almost for free. This is joint work with Antonio Faonio, Maciej Obranski, Joe Aurepeiro, Marc Simkin, Maciej Oskorski and Daniela Venturi. The security analysis of cryptographic primitives typically relies on the assumption that the underlying secrets are uniformly random to the eyes of the attacker. In reality, however, this assumption may be false due to the presence of so-called side-channel attacks. More formally, suppose that we have a random variable X, for example it may be a secret key, the private randomness of some algorithm or in general something which should be kept private. A leakage function for the variable X is defined as a factual F which takes as input as simple from the set X and outputs some binary string. Clearly, it is impossible to achieve leakage resilience against arbitrary functions because for instance, the attacker could choose the identity function thus obtaining the secret in full. Because of this, we need to define some restrictions, for example, on the function family from which the attacker can choose the function. Before introducing the leakage models, we need to talk about manentropy. Intuitively, the manentropy measures how hard it is to guess the outcome of the random variable X. Given two random variables, we adopt the definition of conditional average manentropy of Doddy's et al. Because although being slightly counter-intuitive at first, it better captures the notion of residual entropy after learning the outcome of Z. Indeed, consider an example which compares this notion with a possibly more intuitive one. In this case, the random variable X is such that if the first bit is 0, then all the bits are 0, otherwise the other bits are uniformly random. Then with probability 1 over 2, it is possible to fully predict the outcome of X and with probability 1 over 2 again, the outcome of X is completely random except for the first bit. Therefore, the average of the residual manentropy after learning the first bit is n over 2. However, an attacker has probability at least 1 over 2 of guessing the outcome of X just looking at the first bit, and the notion of conditional average manentropy fully captures this setting by saying that the manentropy of X conditioned on B in average is approximately the same of one bit, or in other words, guessing the outcome of X is not harder than guessing the outcome of a single random bit. Now we are ready to introduce the various leakage models. The simplest model we could think of is the one of Bandit leakage, in which the adversary computes a function of X which outputs at most L arbitrary bits. Thanks to its simplicity and versatility, this model, introduced for the first time by Jembovsky and Piedrok, has been widely used in cryptographic constructions that remain secure even in the presence of leakage. However, in real-world side-channel attacks, the leakage obtained by the adversary is far from being bounded. For instance, the power trace of a physical implementation of AES typically consists of several megabytes of information, which is much larger than the length of the secret key. This motivates a more general notion of noisy leakage, where there is no upper bound on the length of the leakage, but instead we assume that the leakage is somewhat noisy, in the sense that it does not reveal too much information about the secret X. More formally, the first and simplest model of noisy leakage is the one in which conditioning the minentropy of X on the leakage does not decrease the conditional average minentropy of X by too much. In our work, we refer to this model as minentropy noisy leakage. A slightly weaker model replaces the random variable X, which may be not uniform, with the uniform distribution U. In our work, we refer to this model as uniform noisy leakage. Another variant of noisy leakage is the one in which we consider the statistical distance between the pair XZ and the pair XZ' where Z' is a random variable distributed exactly like Z, but which does not depend on the outcome of X. In particular, we ask for the statistical distance to be bounded by some leakage parameter, and we refer to this model as statistical distance noisy leakage. Finally, consider the notion of mutual information between the random variable X and its leakage Z, and we ask that this mutual information should be bounded by some leakage parameter. We refer to this model as mutual information noisy leakage. Actually, there are several other models which depend on further restrictions to the relation between X and Z, or the leakage function family. However, in our paper, we mainly consider these four models since they are the most common used.  In particular, we show an example of why minentropy noisy leakage and uniform noisy leakage are not the same thing, and we prove two other separations. First, we prove that statistical distance noisy and minentropy noisy leakages are two really different models, and then we prove that although mutual information noisy leakage is statistical distance noisy leakage, the opposite is false. To make things more clear, here is a diagram of all the leakage models taken into consideration. The first one is the simplest one, the bounded leakage. Then we have the uniform noisy leakage, which contains the bounded leakage. Indeed, leaking L bits from the uniform random variable decreases its minentropy of at most L. Then we have the slightly more powerful notion of minentropy noisy leakage, in which the random variable is not required to be uniform. Then the statistical distance noisy leakage, which as said before, we prove to be quite different from minentropy noisy leakage. And finally, mutual information noisy leakage, which is inside statistical distance leakage, but we prove that they are not the same. Motivated by this situation, we consider the following question. Can we reduce noisy leakage resilience, which is more powerful, to bounded leakage resilience, which is simpler to achieve in a general way, thus achieving the best of both worlds? And our mind result is a positive answer to this question. And of course, we solve it by defining yet another leakage model, which we call dense leakage. The plan is to show how the other models of leakage are indeed dense leakage, and then to prove that dense leakage is simulatable from bounded leakage. Before stating the definition of dense leakage, we need to define further relations between two distributions. In particular, we define the notion of density of distributions. Formally, we say that a distribution P is delta dense in P prime. If forever Z in capital Z, it holds that P of Z is at most 1 over delta times P prime of Z. We also define the relaxed notion of approximate density, which informally says that P is delta dense in P prime, with high probability over the choice of Z. Now we are ready to define the dense leakage. Given a leakage function F, we say that F is dense leakage for X if the distribution of the leakage conditioned on X being equal to a fixed little X, is delta dense in the distribution of the leakage unconditioned with high probability over the choices of X and Z. By using the notion of approximate density, the distribution of the leakage conditioned on X equals little X, is approximate delta dense in the distribution of the leakage unconditioned with high probability over the choice of X. The notion of density allows for approximating distributions with other distributions. In particular, if P is delta dense in P prime and we have access to a certain number of independent samplings from P prime, then we can run the rejection sampling algorithm to obtain a value which is a good approximation of a sample from the distribution P. How does the rejection sampling work? Well, first of all, we sample S independent samples from P prime and we initially set I to be both. Then we define the bit Bj to be 1 with probability delta times P of Zj over P prime of Zj and we set Bj equals 0 otherwise. Now if Bj is equal to 1, we update I to be equal to J and we halt the loop. Otherwise, we keep running the algorithm until we run out of samples. Finally, we return the index I which is the index of the candidate sample we are using to approximate P or both if the algorithm failed to produce such candidate. It is easy to see that the distribution P tilde from which is sample the outcome Zi is close to original distribution P. To get more comfortable with the notion of dense leakage, here is an example of a 2 to the minus l dense leakage function for the uniform distribution over 0, 1 to the n. I copied the definition of dense leakage in this slide for convenience and in particular the function simply outputs the first l bits of its input. First of all, we fix an input X and then we parse X as Z concatenated to Y where Z is the l bit prefix and Y is the remainder of the string. Then we study the distribution of the leakage condition on X being equal to little x. In particular, for all l bit strings Z prime, the probability of the random variable Z being equal to Z prime is exactly one if Z prime is the l bit prefix of X and it is exactly zero otherwise. On the other side, without conditioning on X equals little x, the random variable Z is uniform over l bit strings and therefore for each l bit string Z prime Z has probability to the the minus l of being equal to Z prime. Since we want the distribution of Z condition on X equals little X to be dense in the distribution of Z and conditioned we have to choose delta to be at least to the minus l. Actually this value suffices for the condition distribution to be dense in the unconditioned one so we just proved that F is delta dense leakage for X for delta equals to the minus l. A little spoiler here, this example not only shows how to prove that a function is delta dense but also shows what is the role of the parameter delta. I'll say more on this when stating our simulation theorem but before talking about that I'll show a limitation for the case of main entropy noisy leakage which also helps to understand some of the challenges behind our goal of studying the relations between the leakage models. First of all we consider the notion of semi-flatness. A distribution is semi-flat if intuitively it is not too distant from being uniform. Here is an example of a non-semi-flat distribution. Well of course it depends on the parameters but this distribution clearly is not semi-flat for too small values of alpha. In particular we have an initial spike of a high probability and the distribution is uniform everywhere else. Consider now the following leakage function which is random on the spike and it is quite regular on the uniform part. You can think of F to be the function which on the uniform part outputs the l-bit prefix of X. Now let's try to see what happens when we leak from X obtaining for example the value 3. The problem here is that the spike decreases the main entropy of X quite a lot while the distribution of X on the uniform part has still quite high min entropy. As a consequence a function decreasing the main entropy of X by l actually requires leaking way more than l-bits in order to have a small simulation error. For this reason when talking about min entropy noise leakage we have to factor in the alpha semi-flatness of the distribution we are trying to approximate and this increases the amount of leakage required. Let's move now to the main result of the paper. First we define the following simulation paradigm. We say that the leakage family F is simulatable from another leakage family G if for each leakage function in F there exists simulator which is able to approximate the leakage with one leakage query chosen in the family G with small simulation error. With this paradigm in mind we prove the following result. For a random variable X the family of delta dense leakage is simulatable with small error from the family of l bounded leakage where l is defined as logarithm of one over delta plus some stuff which is actually very small in most applications. The proof is quite simple and consists of constructing for a given dense leakage function a simulator which applies rejection sampling to approximate the leakage. In particular first the simulator samples a certain number of independent samples from the distribution of the unconditioned leakage. Then constructs a leakage function which upon input X runs the rejection sampling algorithm to sample from the distribution of the leakage conditioned on the value X and then outputs the resulting index i. Finally the simulator outputs the i sample. The bounded leakage performed is only needed to obtain the index i and it depends only on the parameter delta. As I said before by ignoring all the other stuff which is negligible in almost all situations we can see that the dense leakage parameter delta is strongly related to the bounded leakage parameter l. Here is the diagram of before in which we also use the red arrows to denote that the dense leakage is simulatable from the bounded leakage with a slight simulation error. There are many applications to our result one of them is about the lower bounds in communication complexity for instance when considering bounded collusion protocols. In a bounded collusion protocol there are several parties and each party holds some input xi and the goal is to evaluate some boolean function of all the inputs. To achieve this goal it is defined an interactive protocol in which in each round a certain subset of the parties is chosen to cooperate and output some partial result. The usual definition of the bounded collusion protocol requires that the length of the transcript which is output by the colluding parties in each round is bounded by some parameter l. We define two variants of this notion both without limitations on the length of the transcript. The first one is in the noisy model in which the partial results output by the parties in each round are uniform noisy leakages of their inputs and the second one is in the dense model in which the partial results output by the parties in each round are dense leakages of their inputs. By studying these new notions we obtain two major results. The first one is another lower bound in communication complexity in particular to evaluate certain boolean functions the transcript not only needs to be sufficiently long but also needs to contain a large amount of information about the inputs. The second result which is also a consequence of the first one is the possibility to leave the security of cryptographic primitives whose leakage resilience is modeled as a bounded communication bcp to the more general setting of noisy leakage or dense leakage. In conclusion we first introduced the notion of dense leakage which captures many existing notions of noisy leakage. Then we have shown that a single query of dense leakage can be simulated in the information theoretic setting using a single query of bounded leakage therefore allowing also to simulate noisy leakage with bounded leakage. Finally we gave some applications in leakage resilient cryptography not only in the setting of bounded collusion protocols but also in the leakage resilience of linear secret sharing or essentially in any cryptographic primitive with bounded leakage resilience in the information theoretic setting such as forward secure storage leakage resilient storage leakage resilient non malleable codes and many others. Unfortunately in the computational setting things may be a bit more difficult and this brings us to the first open problem. Can we make our simulator efficient for certain families of noisy leakage? Although our simulation may be inefficient we give an idea of application in the computational setting by lifting bounded leakage to noisy leakage for passively secure multi-party computation in the common reference training model and for a concrete construction of leakage resilient one-way functions in the floppy model. Another problem we leave open is whether other families of noisy leakage which we have not considered now work for within the class of dense leakage thus achieving simulatability through bounded leakage. Then we leave open to improve our results for bounded collusion protocols. In particular we achieve that each round of bounded communication can be used to simulate a round of noisy communication or dense communication. However since concatenating the output of bounded leakage leads to a bounded transcript we wonder if the same happens with noisy leakage or dense leakage. In other words is it possible to generalize the results on bcps so that it is the final transcript to be noisy leakage or dense leakage of the inputs instead of the single communication rounds? Finally and more in general is it possible to extend our results to the setting of multiple leakage queries? The problem with this is that once obtained the result of the first leakage query the second query itself may depend on such leakage and this makes the reduction much harder. For instance in the setting of uniform noisy leakage the first leakage query leaks some information from the uniform random variable which then is not uniform anymore. Can we overcome these problems? If you're interested I invite you to take a look at our paper to see more in detail our results and open problems. That's it for now and thank you very much for your attention.


So I was talking a little bit about the journey that myself and fully homomorphic encryption were taking in the last well Decade decade and a half I guess turning from like an idea something that is potentially a dream to a really vibrant ecosystem of companies and academia and a lot of projects and a lot of Software developments and hardware developments and a lot of projects that are coming in together To create this thing that could actually have like a true impact in the real world So it's talking a little bit about the beginning of the journey where things really seemed like you know a dream that it was not like a Theoretical game that we were playing with ourselves with considerations of aesthetics and what's the right way to sort of define things and do things And how this actually evolved into the sort of schemes that can you can actually implement and use in the real world We're also discussing a little bit about the challenges that still lie ahead And and further research that is done in this area Right, so I guess I was saying decade and a half But I also mentioned in the talk that the idea of homomorphic encryption actually dates back to the late 70s so So progress was not actually uniform and it's been a long time before gentry Introduced his first candidate for for fully homomorphic encryption scheme and that contained a lot of you know new ideas that had to be Explored in order to be brought to a place where they can be used practically And there was a lot of again theoretical work that went into understanding Understanding what are these objects and what makes them work and once we managed to understand? Sort of these these primitives we were able to sort of reduce also the parameters that had to do with complexity and with the so-called noise growth in these homomorphic encryption schemes and come up with parameters and with ways to describe the problem that actually made it possible for for Implementation to actually take place because things were easier to describe in the sense that you could actually take it and Implemented without too much trouble and they were also sort of working more efficiently So these are sort of steps that were taken from sort of a theoretical standpoint That brought it to a point where you could start implementing and once you start implementing you can also start Optimizing and sort of applying all of these techniques from that world from the world of I would say more practitioners and and sort of security researchers and programmers and Actually get to the point where you can apply these optimization techniques to actually take it to a level where we have deployable Software software libraries that that people are actually constructing and they're actually planning to use homomorphic encryption Was envisioned as a way to preserve privacy as I explained in in the talk We need to be careful when we talk about homomorphic encryption as a solution So homomorphic encryption is certainly a tool in a broader sort of set of tools that we have in order to ensure Privacy homomorphic encryption is a way to take a computation on encrypted data and produce an encrypted outcome Now the question is what do you do once you have this encrypted outcome? Do you decrypt it if you decrypt it? Why you do how where do you get the decryption key from what do you do with the decryption? outcome and so forth so what I see is homomorphic encryption taking place as perhaps a major tool, but not an only tool in Sort of a more complete security paradigm that would allow that would allow us to actually sort of Outsource or or be able to Perform computation remotely in a way that preserves our privacy and also security of of our data I really think that we should like dare to dream because Again as I said in the beginning it really seemed a lot of points along the way it seemed like okay We sort of figured out what we could figure out, but we're still very far from this thing ever being useful in practice and it turned out that just continuing to push Had made a great difference. So so I think this is like a good Take-home message To not be deterred by things that at the beginning seem like they're just you know theoretical toys that they're never going to find Any applications and and sort of keep I guess a scientific open mind and and have like you know apply your sense of aesthetics to to these to these problems and Sometimes it works out sometimes you actually get great benefits from from these these sort of approach


Hello everyone, it's Missy. Thank you for watching. For today's video I thought it would be fun to do the woven braid as an updo. I've done this as a ponytail and a half up style, so I thought it would be fun to do a fancier version of it. Let me know in the comment section what you think about this look. Make sure to like and subscribe, click that notification bell, and let's get started. The first thing I'm going to do for this hairstyle is the braid. So I've parted my hair on the right side since I want my braid on the left. Then I'm going to divide out the section of hair that I'll be using. So from my part down towards my left ear, I'm going to clip away the rest of my hair. I have a lot of little broken hairs around my hairline and part, so I'm going to use a little pomade to help smooth these down. Now I'm going to pick up a small horizontal section next to the part and divide this into three smaller pieces. I'm going to cross the right strand over the middle and then cross the left strand over the middle. Now I'm going to take the right strand and drop it down, bringing it over my head. Then I'm going to pick up a new section of hair in its place and cross it over the middle strand. Then I'm going to cross the left strand over the middle and bring in a new section of hair.  Now I'm crossing the left strand over the middle and bringing in a new section. And then I'm dropping the right strand, crossing the previously dropped piece underneath it and crossing it over the middle strand. I'm also going to add in a new section of hair from the right side of the braid, just to ensure the three pieces stay about the same size. And I'm just going to repeat these steps, continuing the braid until I've brought in all of the hair from this left side of my head. So on the front side of the braid, I'm always crossing the side strand over the middle while adding in a new section of hair. And on the right side or back side of the braid, I'm always going to drop down the piece and make sure the piece that was previously dropped down is brought underneath the new section before it's crossed into the braid. This is what will create the woven type of look and it's the difference between a four strand braid and this braid. I also bring in some sections to the back side of the braid simply to help keep the strands similar in size. It also helps anchor the braid as well, so it doesn't lift up or lay oddly against my head. So then once I've brought in all of the hair, I'm just going to continue the braid in the same way until I've reached the end of the section. And then I'm just going to slide a bobby pin over the bottom so it doesn't unravel. Now that the braid is done, I'm going to spray it with hairspray and smooth down the edges before moving on to the back portion of the hairstyle. So I'm first going to divide off the top section of hair, the hair around my crown, and I'm going to twist this section together, lay it against the middle of the back of my head and pin it in place.  I'm going to use a few bobby pins to hold this hair in place, and I just want to make sure they stay hidden underneath the hair. So now I want to pin back the braid. So first I'm going to carefully pull on the edges of the looped sections to make the braid wider. This will help the different sections of the braid show up better. I really want the braid to pop out and be the main part of the hairstyle, and this will help achieve that. So I'm going to bring the braid around the back of my head and pin it right underneath the crown section. I'm going to slide the bobby pins into the braid so they hold the hair in place, but stay hidden underneath the hair.  So I'm going to be doing my favorite messy bun. I've done this hairstyle two other ways, and this one was my favorite. So to do the bun, I'm going to combine the rest of my hair together at the nape of my neck. Using a hair band, I'm going to wrap this once over the ponytail, making sure the hair band is in my right hand.  I'm going to grip the bun in my hands and pull it apart. This will make the bun bigger, and it will also tighten the hair band against my head. Now I'm going to take the ends, sticking out the bottom, and divide these into two sections. With the right section, I'm going to loop this hair back towards the hair band and tuck it into the hair band, so it's wrapped around it, and this will form a loop on the right side of the bun. I wrapped mine twice just because I didn't want my ends sticking out, and depending on the length of your hair, you'll either have to wrap this once, maybe twice, maybe three times if you have super long hair, and then I'm going to take the hair on the left side and repeat the same steps again, looping the hair towards the hair band and tucking it around it to form a loop. Again, I tucked mine two times to form two loops just so there weren't any ends left sticking out, and then I just set the style with hairspray. Thank you so much for watching that Reps of Today's video. Make sure to let me know in the comment section what you think about this hairstyle. Also be sure to like and subscribe and click that notification bell so you never miss any future videos, and I will see you next time.


So today I bring you one of the most broken glitches in the game. Unlimited skill tree points. Yes, you heard that right. My skill trees are maxed out and I still have points to spare. Like what? How's it going guys? My name's DPJ and today I bring you another BR3 video. If you do enjoy it, leaving a like really helps out and subscribe if you do want to see more. Also, before we go any further for all your gaming needs, no matter the platform you play on, amazing prices and incredible weekly deals, check out G2A, links within the video description. So if I'm honest, in my opinion this takes away from the game and how it's meant to be played, but I know there are a lot of you guys out there that love this kind of thing. Love muddied weapons and love glitches. I learned this the hard way ages ago when I uploaded a video on a mudded weapon and many of you agreed with me that although they can ruin the game for many, some people absolutely love them and they feel they're meant to make the game even more exciting and I kind of get that.  That's completely up to you. And I won't even lie to you guys, I have pals who also love mudded weapons and such. Now this to me though, I'm only showing you how to do it. I myself won't be using this glitch to help me progress within the future of the game. Now credit to this must go to Turnopul6 and Spreadsickness who showed me how this is done. Now Spreadsickness runs a great discord server based on Borderlands, which if you want to check out you will find links within the video description. I mean if you have problems doing this glitch, go there for help. So how this is done is literally quite simple in theory, but achieving it can be quite difficult. And that's because it requires a ton of lag. And yes by the way this works on all platforms. Now the lag required for this is that kind of lag you get when there's just too much loot in that small space. That kind of major lag. And even with this it's still quite difficult to achieve because it's best to be done on Sanctuary. I went into a friend's lobby and due to him being on the other side of the planet, the lag was kind of already standard. But with him inside of his inventory spamming those bumpers, the lag was just perfect. So get yourself into a laggy lobby. And I mean it has to be serious lag. Maybe spam up the place with Legendaries 2 that might help you. Then what you need to do is respect. Once you have go into your menu and across your skill trees. Here it's simple to test if the lag is working. Spam points into any skills. If you notice your points are actually being used then it isn't working so respect a gain. For me to create even extra lag I was quickly pressing my bumpers. Upon doing this I did notice when spamming those points my actual points were not going down. Now if this works and you are spamming and those points are not going down. Just keep spamming until it doesn't allow you to spam anymore. At first I believe it will limit you to 58 points you can spend. So if you are spamming and you still have points there to spare.  This is the important part. You need to quit out the game while you still have those points showing they're there for you to spend. If the game does catch up it will deduct all the points and it will be too late for you. So what I did was to create extra lag. The second time of me doing this the first time you'll see in a second what I did was to create extra lag to make sure it didn't catch me up was quickly spam bumpers and then quit out the game. Loading back into my own sanctuary I had the points there to spend. But the ones I'd already spent still registered as being spent. Now when you respect it takes away the points you spent and adds them to that total number you have. Now when I first did this you can see this on screen now. I was spamming them points into the same Sentinel skill tree and noticed it throws at 48. So I spent 34 quickly then quit out. Upon going back to my own sanctuary I respect and it added those 34 points onto the 48 it throws at giving me a total of 82. Now as long as those lag you can do this for as much as you like giving yourself unlimited points to spend. I ended up have to literally two tries at this getting 150 points which is more than enough to fill all three trees. Why I will state is though and it's very important to note when to achieve more than the standard level 60 58 points there is no going back from what I know. Yeah you don't have to use more than 58 points if you don't want to but it will always state you have more there to be spent hence why I did this on an awk character. So yeah guys this is how you get yourself unlimited skill tree points and well if it's your kind of thing enjoy it while you can. Again it's difficult to achieve as generating the lag required is quite hard. I tried in another friends of lobby who wasn't on the other side of the world actually it was about 60 miles from me but we couldn't generate enough lag no matter what we did. It was only when I joined a friends of lobby across the pond that it would work. But yeah it is quite simple when you get it down join someone's laggy lobby respect go into your inventory go across to that skill tree page probably spam a couple of bumpers before you do so to generate even more lag and just spam points into those skills if that number is chosen and you're still spending it is working just remember you need to quit out before the game catches up and deducts the points you've already spent. If you do this right when you get back onto the game when you load it back up and load into sanctuary you'll have the skills you spent the points in but you'll also have that number of points the game throws at so when you respect it will take away the points you've spent but also add them to the total it throws at so it is quite simple in theory but like I said generating enough lag is a difficult part but if you can do that enjoy it while you can guys and on that note we have come to the end of the video if you guys enjoyed it leaving a like really helps out if you're new around here want to see more boardlands be sure to subscribe and if you never want to miss a video I upload can turn notifications on by hitting that bell button but guys thanks as always for stopping by hopefully you enjoyed the video and hopefully I will see you on that next one