Sanketh Menda

I am an undergraduate student in the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo.

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At the beginning of my undergrad, I spent two years hanging out at the IQC, some of it officially, where I drank a lot of espresso and learnt a little quantum computing. Then, I transitioned into thinking about computer security and it seems to be my glass slipper. I also care about privacy.

Contact

Hip peeps can send me a message on Keybase chat @sanketh (don’t forget to make the messages ).

Less hip peeps can send me an email; you can find my email here. If you’d like, you can encrypt it using my PGP key (fingerprint: BC2F BB19 7861 CE9E B638 A337 70B2 7CFA 0AEC F418). (I don’t recommend this, PGP is not forward-secure or deniable.)

pronoun.is/he¹

While I Have You Here

1. Wonder about the power of near-term quantum computers. Can they do exceptional things or are they just the insanely-useless cousins of useful quantum computers? Matt Coudron and I wrote a paper on how limiting the depth of quantum computers could make them less useful than ones without those limits, even if the quantum computers were infused with classical computers. I also noted a few open problems in this blog post.
2. Think about tracking by browser fingerprinting. Browser fingerprints are a kind of ever-cookies, cookies that cannot be removed, do you think the web should allow this kind of un-opt-out-able tracking? Try out modern defenses like the canvas poison pill, report breakages on websites on BugZilla, and provide feedback on proposals, like Canvas Tainting for Fingerprinting Resistance, which try to provide privacy while keeping some of the usability.
3. Muse on cryptographic fuzzy hashing. Can we detect and stop certain kinds of media (like CSAM) from speading without invading the user’s privacy? I jotted down some thoughts on this here.

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