david wong

Hey! I'm David, cofounder of zkSecurity and the author of the Real-World Cryptography book. I was previously a crypto architect at O(1) Labs (working on the Mina cryptocurrency), before that I was the security lead for Diem (formerly Libra) at Novi (Facebook), and a security consultant for the Cryptography Services of NCC Group. This is my blog about cryptography and security and other related topics that I find interesting.

Start of the school year posted September 2013

time table imported to google cal thanks to hackjack's fabulous application
I have at the moment 5 classes which are all taught in french (I guess because there are not enough foreigners this year), but some of them use english for their slides.

Programmation

Nothing really new to me, some people coming from the same bachelor as I (mathematics) have difficulties getting to know Linux and programming as a whole for the first time. I'm used to coding so I'm pretty confident (I shouldn't relax too much though). We started on a fast-course on C, GCC, Emacs, SVN... and will move on later with Java. It's taught by Emmanuel Fleury who is a very chill professor, good vibe, very easy to talk to. And the best part is that everything he talks about is online here so if you're interested in the course I'm taking you can have a look there. PS: we're learning a bit of LaTeX AND will have to submit final reports in LaTeX. This is great as I have sought a good occasion to learn it for a while. PS2: I'm using LearnXinYminutes.com to get back into C (haven't coded in C for more than 4 years). It's a great website and I recommend it to you if you want to learn something about any language and already have knowledge in programming.

Théorie de l'information

Taught by the head of the Cryptology Master, Gilles Zemor, the course seems like an introduction to some of the concepts around Cryptography. Our first classes were about Entropy (which I talked about a bit in the previous post) and easy notions of probability. Here are the professor's notes about the course.

Arithmétique

The only "real" Math course we have, and I'm a bit surprised since this is a "Mathematics" Master". It's essentially about rings, it's about stuff I already learned. Nothing really captivating at the moment.

Automates et Complexité

This is one of the most intriguing course, people coming from an IT bachelor seem to have no problem with it. I don't really understand the point of learning this but I like it, it's a lot like Regular Expressions and is about logic more than learning concepts by heart. As a programmer it just seems like funny games to me :) (it might get more difficult very quickly). Note : it's taught by Anca Muscholl.

Réseaux

The only course I had to choose, but we didn't have much choice since they removed half of the available courses including the one I wanted to take (Probability). The course is taught by... it's a rapid introduction about network concept. I'm not really into it, it speaks too briefly about many things, some are interesting, some are not. I was supposed to have an application class but apparently our professor fell asleep on his way (he's narcoleptic). Overall I was surprised by the absence of real "cryptology courses". But the professors told us they would come very quickly in the second semester, so nothing to worry about.
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