Composable Security
On trust, academic honesty and cancelling Thanksgiving
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COMPOSABLE SECURITY*
A few days before the November election, I was interviewing a quantum cryptography expert for a popular science piece I had been working on. They were an independent experts that graciously offered time to help me understand the context of a study at the center of my piece. I asked the expert about practical applications of advances in academic research on quantum devices, an unavoidable question for any story where even a hint of an impending quantum future can be detected. The conversation veered toward discussing quantum generators for secure cryptographic keys. The expert explained that the issue of making such devices widely used and available is really not one of physics, but rather of some sort of social science. Their point was that it was all about trust, or informed trust to be more precise, and not at all about anything like the kind of quantum excellence that academics either fawn or fight over.
The conundrum goes something like this. A physicist comes up with an extremely safe key based on some exotic quantum process. They can prove that the process is secure from eavesdroppers and hackers by invoking sophisticated mathematics, quantum information theory and maybe even the fundamentally probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics. They write up their work and it passes peer review. It gets published because other physicists either buy it or double-check it themselves. But then, a CTO of some cryptography or communication company takes a look and just cannot figure out how this exotic, complex, often finnicky, thing is better than whatever classical protocol their company already uses. The physicist’s work can be proven to be trustworthy in as objective a manner as the scientific community has cooked up so far, but the trust of an outsider to that community is conditional on their understanding of what trustworthy even means. The quality of the work means little if the person evaluating it doesn’t speak the language of the person that carried it out. We all end up without super secure quantum encryption for our phones.
Towards the end of the interview, the expert pointed out that for years there have been academic papers proving that many commonly used cryptography keys are very low quality because they are generated by classical computers in very naïve ways. They are fairly unsafe and unsafe in a provable way, the expert underlined. In that light, the upgrade to quantum methods and devices sounded like the most sensible thing in the world. But most people are not familiar with quantum physics, I was reminded by the smiling face on the other side of the Zoom connection, and I can only get excited about a quantum cryptography study because I am. My idea of trustworthiness and security is also predicted by my knowledge.
When we hung up I started feeding the recording of the conversation into a very low-budget transcription software and while I edged on fully zoning out while the various wheels turned and bars filled up, I had a small flashback of the first week of my 9th grade conceptual physics class. A student that stayed quiet for most of the week as we discussed what science is, who it is for and who gets to do it, stumped me by speaking up while I was going over the scientific method. They said: “Does it even matter that this is how you do good science if people you are talking to don’t believe in science to begin with?” These are then some of the key ingredients to trust in a process or a claim or maybe even an institution – knowledge and belief.
***
A few days after the November election, I had to report a student violating my school’s academic integrity policy. I previously noticed that some of my other students had been dancing on the ledge of such violations, citing integration identities we hadn’t quite studied yet and having very flimsy explanations for this knowledge, or submitting answers that differed from those of their study partners by only a word or two. I’d written them scary emails and scary Google Classroom comments and made some scary remarks in class. This approach seemed to work, and I was relieved to not have to bring in the school administration, to file reports, to do something a little too close to policing to sit quite right with me. This case, however, was too egregious to ignore. Reluctantly, I reached out to an administrator in charge of processes that academic dishonesty leads to when it is detected. The administrator assured me that I was doing the correct thing. The student was probably just overwhelmed by the workload in the new school, especially under pandemic circumstances, and made a bad judgement. The academic integrity violation process will shake them up into getting better study habits or maybe asking for help and extensions instead of cheating the next time when they feel overstretched. Or at least that was the take meant to justify my handing out a whole bunch of punitive zero grades to this student and emailing their parents. The whole thing was made sound like I was almost doing the student a favor.
When I pulled the student aside for a private conversation the next day, a complicated task while we are strictly enforcing physical distancing, the eyes staring back at me above a baby blue surgical mask did not seem to reveal much. Was it shock or fear or indifference? I struggled for a positive word or two to try and end on. The student offered something like an apology and I tried to verbalize something like a promise to be supportive instead of holding a grudge going forward. It did not seem to me like this minor confrontation would lead to anything becoming clearer for either of us. I wondered whether it was actually me that betrayed their trust by bringing in the institution of the school into what was something like a social contract between us two.
And wasn’t it me that failed at least a little when the student would rather cheat than reach out for help? When they felt that cheating was a better tool for getting the task at hand done than all the ones I had given them? Trust and failures of trust are relational, they hurt either person involved in a trust-related incident. The blame spills over from one person and splashes onto the other, even if the latter thought they’d come out of the incident squeaky clean. This is partly why both apologies and punishments can be so ineffective – they don’t address the possibility that someone was set-up for a trust-failure from the get-go.
Of course, policies that we have in place for incidents of this sort are there so that everyone would be treated equally. Not cutting deals with students based on a teacher’s one-on-one relationship ensures some semblance of equity, something like small-j school justice. I understand that and I know that it is necessary. But my stomach was still in knots when I went to teach my next class, this one filled with older, more raucous students. They probably also cheat sometimes but they have more experience, so they do it better. Because they are older and firmly rooted in the school’s college program, I at times explicitly tell them that it is not my job to police them, but rather to teach them. They can take that – my desire to be a source of knowledge rather than suspicion and authority - or leave it because I want to trust that they can be in charge of their own learning. In our relationship, I want to be the kind of person that can be trusting and that colors how I define trust for all of us to begin with.
These things then also factor into trust: how uncomfortable are you willing to be, how confrontational, how generous with overlooking incidents, how committed to letting others deal with outcomes of their own mistakes.
***
During the week after the November election, my partner and I committed all of our movie watching time to Alan Pakula’s “paranoia trilogy”. We had watched the Parallax View in some other life where watching a film together, in the same state and the same bed, was a treat and a privilege. Now, in our own apartment (still overrun with boxes from a very recent move), we turned to Klute and All the President’s Men for a few more hits of stunning filmography and a gripping sense of distrust.
These movies are slow and their plots drag and waver. Ultimately, they seem to mostly be a vehicle for transporting a remarkable amount of dread from the screen straight into the viewer’s suddenly tightened chest. No one in the trilogy is likeable or trustworthy. Whenever a new character is introduced, you brace yourself for some lie or scheme they will be revealed to have generated or covered up. There is a scene in Klute where a mullet-ed Jane Fonda stumbles through a sweaty party just to collapse at the seat and feet of a former troublesome lover and abusive business associate. She looks frightened and exhausted and near feverish. What she’s in the market for is the devil she knows, a distrustful figure that can nevertheless be trusted to act poorly. In All the President’s Men the heroes, the protagonist journalists, are almost as scheme-prone as her working girl** character – they are presumably after the truth, but they blur every ethical line that can possibly be blurred in order to get there. Even the good guys cannot be looked up to or trusted in this extended universe of dread and lies.
My partner and me are political creatures. We listen to NPR in the morning then talk smack about Michael Barbaro’s propensity for pity porn on the New York Times’ The Daily over morning coffee. When we heard Nate Silver’s voice through our new neighbor’s wall, we both joked that there was now no doubt that we have a place in the building. This is all to say that we were not watching films filled to the brim with distrust of institutions and abuses of power without feeling the resonance of the current moment heavily upon us. Like Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham discuss on a recent episode of Still Processing, or like my friend Christian Sager wrote about horror fiction recently, fantasies we construct for ourselves or take in by our own volition are never without valence. We need stories to process our being in some digestible format. Or maybe we need to be inoculated against the upcoming hurtful turns in our personal narratives. Watching fictional, and not so fictional characters, deal with distrust and lies in the evening while a pundit tells you about the exact same things in the morning is a cocktail that either really demoralizes or really steels you. Following the news since the election has certainly made me feel both demoralized and ready for anything, flip-flopping between moods much like a character in an overly dramatic movie might.
Talking about trust these days is akin to picking sides, to acting on all those things that usually factor into who we do and do not trust – our beliefs, our knowledge, our discomforts – but at an extent that feels extreme and in a manner much more explicit than ever before. Who you say you trust signals who you think you want to be. Who you say you trust signals the kind of society you think you want to live in. And in the age of a global pandemic, who you trust can be a matter of life and death, without an exaggeration. It’s hard to empathize with those that trust one bewildered individual so much more than a whole lot of experts and arbiters that they are willing to deny the votes of so many others. It is even harder to empathize with those that even when confronted with death and suffering refuse to trust science. And I know that none of those folks would probably want to empathize with me nor would they trust my judgement or maybe even my person. They know, as much as anyone, that trust means less than all those things that underlie it do. That trust is just an outwardly symbol of a more complex internal process. I’m sure that in a few years there will be well-shot, darkly lit films about how much we distrusted each other in 2020.
***
By the time the administrator of the General Services Administration approved the transition from a now loser president to a now winner president elect, my husband and I had already cancelled all of our Thanksgiving plans. Schools in New York City transitioned to fully remote instruction after another spike in the city-wide coronavirus positivity rate, and our usual big family gathering got reduced first to a small, tentative number of younger folks with a testing mandate attached then, finally, to a promise to spend half an hour on a roof deck trading leftovers after dinner, a few siblings and their plus ones at a time. Talk of an indoor dinner, no matter how small or how spread throughout my brother-in-law’s loft of just a few weeks prior suddenly started to feel like a luxury we could ask for only in some parallel reality. “I guess I’ll just make some Croatian desserts for the two of us” I told my husband with a major shrug, grasping for something that feels as both a comfort and a welcome distraction.
Thanksgiving is not my holiday. Not only am I not American, but I have moved to this country at just the right time and the right age to not be oblivious to the grim history and troublesome political implications of this day. Being vegan, the turkey and the gravy and whatever butter and milk-heavy desserts exist across American family traditions have also been more of an obstacle than a draw for me. However, I did grow up with big family holidays, with crowded tables and uncles that talk with their mouths full or eat too slowly, with kitchen chaos, with broken plates and collapsing chairs and bowls of mayonnaise-driven salads being caught in mid-air after a faithful-seeming drop. I grew up with loud holidays, with holidays filled with food and drink and a thick feeling in the air that made your chest contract in anxiety and your heart pound with something like joy all at the same time. As my friend Alex wrote in a letter this week, when you are a kid there are occasions when you just manage capture everything about a moment and cannot escape the detail and the exactness of the memory afterwards. So many family holiday quirks are embedded in my mind this way. In recent years I was able to find echoes of those long-stored feelings around a Brooklyn Thanksgiving table with a new family I had been lucky to acquire. It’s been almost two years since I was able to visit my family in Croatia, let alone make it through a family holiday with them. Now, holidays with my American family have been rendered equally impossible. Suddenly, it feels like I have to grieve a day and a tradition that I never really wanted to claim in the first place.
I am all for creating new traditions, for being imaginative when it comes to what together means, for not giving up on connections just because they are suddenly inconvenient. I want my husband and I to be able to have our own holiday and still find some of that loudness and indulgence and joy in each other. And I want to trade glass containers of candied sweet potatoes and roasted brussels sprouts with my brother-in-law on the street and truly feel grateful to have that interaction available, to be so lucky to be neighbors and not fully cut-off from each other by the pandemic. As an immigrant, as a queer person, as someone that has often felt at odds with whatever place I had landed at, I know that finding space for the new and unexpected, and hoarding little bits and pieces of emotional energy for an embrace of whatever goodness and joy may hit you when you didn’t even know it was an option is crucial. However, I am still going into the next few days, weeks even, with a bit of a heaviness and a sense of loss that has followed me throughout this whole year. It’s a similar feeling to what I see in my student’s eyes on my very segmented Zoom screen. It’s not that they don’t want to try and learn, it’s just that trying suddenly feels harder than the learning itself. They get good grades, they ask good questions, they do their homework on time, but sometimes there are silences in our shared cyberspace that are a much better marker of our time together than anything that gets shared or figured-out out loud.
Throughout all of our conversations about Thanksgiving, the phrase “it’s not that we don’t trust you” would eventually make an appearance. Every time it seemed like an unnecessary nicety – these days, trust really can only get you so far.
Best,
Karmela
*In cryptography, composable security refers to being able to combine various computational or logical operations and make up a protocol that is not less secure than any of those operations individually. While there are many rather sophisticated definitions and proofs of composable security the motivation is as simple as this – if a hacker or an eavesdropper couldn’t predict the outcome of one manipulation of some data (this makes it secure) then in a composable secure protocol they should not be able to do so if two or more such operations are performed in some sequence.
** There’s probably an awful lot to be said about the politics of sex and gender in Klute, but this is not quite the time and place.
ABOUT ME LATELY
WRITING: The quantum cryptography article that I mentioned above is the one I was trying to pitch and re-pitch in my last letter. I was only successful after a number of very polite and friendly rejections, but still really enjoyed working on it. Getting to interview some working physicists has felt as exciting as every other time I have done so this year. Having stepped away from research, I am still really enthused and invigorated by other people’s commitment and energy to their work and it feels fulfilling and worthwhile to talk and write about it. The story I ended up writing got caught up in some scheduling nonsense and hasn’t seen the light of day yet, but I’m hoping this will be resolved soon. I have also been steadily but slowly working with the news team at the Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology Center throughout the past few months so I am also keeping an eye out for news items I wrote that they currently have queued up. Certainly, it is still a challenge to find time to write, and especially to find time to look for stories that may make for a good magazine pitch, but I am doing as much as I can and clinging to the good feelings this kind of work affords me even more.
LEARNING: At the beginning of November we moved into a brand new, very clean and very empty apartment. Though we had both lived in our own apartments before, everything that followed building tours and the signing of the lease felt fairly new and unknown to us. We learned how to buy furniture and how to assemble it, how to rope family members into driving our stuff across town and how to keep working and eating semi-real meals while everything we owned was either in boxes that were caught in the mail, in boxes piling up in our hallway or hiding under layers of boxes that we had already broken down. While the place has come together quite a bit in the last three weeks and we have both found routines that can both work by themselves and when intertwined, the point of actually feeling fully moved-in still seems to be somewhere in the far future. I guess I’m learning how to screw legs onto a couch without the correct screwdriver and how to be patient with life all at the same time.
On the teaching front, I somehow made it to midterms in both my 9th grade and my college-level course and most of my students really showed off how much they had learned since we were all first thrown into pandemic-style schooling. I conducted almost a full week of oral calculus exams, many over Zoom, and felt genuinely victorious every time a usually shy and quiet student could do integration by parts or cite a trigonometric identity. I felt really deflated when I had to email a few parents to tell them that I’m failing their child as my school’s early notification policy requires me to do. I tried to highlight that I don’t want the student to get in trouble and it felt like I was getting myself in trouble too. I had to learn that that is part of the job too. I also learned just how much homework I can actually grade in a short amount of time, and how much a small piece of advice or a nice word from a colleague can mean when you’re pressed for time. I learned how to use the big fancy printer in the bookroom, the one that can collate and staple, but I have been less successful with the copier. I learned that I’ll very likely make it through another half-semester and then another and maybe another. It feels both good and terrifying to know that. Almost as terrifying as having to give out seventy midterm grades accompanied by a written narrative of the student’s progress (but I learned that, somehow, I can do that too.)
Finally, I have been minimally helping with a National Science Foundation grant being filled by the amazing leadership team of the Access Network and learning a ton about academic bureaucracy and the kind of technical writing that grant reviewers respond to well. It has been a real onslaught of information, but a fascinating peek into what academic adulthood may look like, even for someone like me. And I do hope that the very large sum of money appearing throughout the various tightly formatted documents does eventually make it into the Network’s budget - the work it has been able to do over the last few years has felt so terribly important and at times genuinely life-giving.
LISTENING: NPR’s Up First in the morning and way too much other political content during the day. Almost every show about movies or TV on the Ringer podcast network – I think I just like how animated the hosts are even when their discussions devolve into minor idiosyncratic nonsense. At this time more than ever before podcasts seem to fulfill not just my desire for information and good storytelling, but a baser need for background chit-chat and spontaneous interaction between people outside of my ever-so-small social circle.
Cult of Luna announced a new album, so I spent some time revisiting their past records. I had underestimated A Dawn to Fear in my past listening, it’s not perfect but still really enjoyable.
For sad cowboy purposes echoing my last letter, I listened to a bunch of Colter Wall which definitely scratched that itch in a more understated and less ostentatious way than my previous Orville Peck obsession.
Lots of Blondie and Television because I have only lived in New York for a short time and when the days are sunny or the nights are crisp, I cannot resist the stereotypical association between the city and some of its past music icons.
And because this is the time of year when I have to admit to myself that holidays do make me homesick, I have put the Spotify algorithm hard at work with generating playlists of ex-Yugoslavian new wave music based on one or another song that crawls out of some recess of my brain where all the memories of the Croatian language and culture still maintain themselves. This is the one I reached for most recently, while I still had a physical school to walk to while listening.
READING: Almost strictly my students’ work and various teaching plans and lesson outlines. I unpacked many of my books and comic books when we moved and arranged them in neat piles where they will, sadly, have to stay unattended until a serious break of some sort allows me to give them some attention again.
WATCHING: In addition to Pakula movies, on Halloween we watched Dario Argento’s Deep Red and on another, less themed, evening we checked out the 1968 Thomas Crown Affair. On the television front, we have made our way through almost four seasons of Schitt’s Creek on Netflix.
It seems almost unnecessary to make extensive comments on a giallo movie made by a master of giallo movies at a time when they could be made in their most true form. Deep Red has a plot that doesn’t quite come together and characters that don’t really develop. It is also riddled with troublesome politics when it comes to gender and sexuality. At the same time, it is scored by Goblin, it is aesthetically both trashy and really tightly put together, and it keeps your eyes glued to the screen throughout its runtime of over two hours. This is not a movie you recommend to everyone. It is, however, the kind of movie that you know should squeak you out, but somehow just draws you in through something like coolness instead. I have a limited capacity for this kind of art, but Deep Red did not exceed it.
The Thomas Crown Affair, staring immaculate iterations of Faye Dunaway and Steve McQueen, also has an inevitable sense of cool to it. It is visually dynamic and compelling though it does at times feel stitched together from what could have been spicy shorts, or even, in some other era, elaborate music videos. Parts of its premise, a rich man organizing robberies just because he seems amused by it, for instance, are interesting and benefit from being played without much over-intellectualizing or embellishments. Others, such as the relationship between McQueen’s criminal and Dunaway’s investigator, worked less well for me. This is a film that ends with tears and anguish, but I will probably remember its look and style much more.
Finally, Schitt’s Creek, a show that has been recommended to me in the past, but that I resisted almost strictly because the name made me think it would be too hokey, is sort of a delight. It does get pretty corny and certainly follows many of the somewhat played-out beats of classic sitcoms from the 90s. This is not exactly an edgy prestige TV approach to comedy. At the same time, this show is at its core about people that like each other and that are able to grow, and that feels more than valuable as far as media goes right about now. Schitt’s Creek is also a rare show that regularly showcases bisexual and pansexual characters and presents its queer protagonists with more joy than defensiveness and sadness. A show where a gay couple does not spend an arc or two fighting bias or earning understanding from their loved ones just feel really refreshing. The show similarly gives its female protagonist a chance to be whole people without getting too didactic, a feature that is also often lacking in comedy series. This is not the deepest piece of television out there nor is it marked by the kind of high production value that so much buzzed about TV seems to have to have now, but it is for sure a palate cleanser and an emotional respite among both real-world news and the never-ending onslaught of high-concept dramas and mysteries meant for the small screen.
EATING: Since I have been swamped with work and our living situation changed pretty drastically in the past month, I have found myself feeling much more off my cooking game than at any other recent time. This is not to say that I stopped cooking most nights, but more so that despite relying on classics like Indian-inspired lentils or various stir-fries and quick pasta dishes and enjoying eating them, I don’t have much to enumerate here. If anything, the appeal of vegan restaurant options in our new neighborhood has been non-trivially exciting and I have been really grateful for a friend or two that was willing to brave the cold weather to check-out even more outdoor vegan dinning across the city. We had some great cake and donuts at a street fair in lower Manhattan, some very creative tacos in our neighborhood, really feel-good Ethiopian food that could be delivered straight to our door contactlessly, and a few Chinese dishes that were crispy and saucy and greasy in the best way and tasted great even in the cold wind of a misleadingly sunny New York day.
As another perk of our new neighborhood, we became somewhat regular at the weekend farmer’s market on weekends, continuing a habit that meant a lot to me while I was in graduate school in Illinois. It has been great to get fresh local produce, often followed by a trip to the nearest bagel spot, then reaching for a bit more of that cooking spark I had all summer when trying to use it all up. The cake recipe I am sharing below is a consequence of one of my excited farmer’s market purchases in the form of a giant Northern Georgia roaster squash. I wanted to puree some of the squash so I could try baking with it, and the result was a soft and tender cake, not too sweet but full of that warm fall flavor that you only really get from late fall produce. While it probably would have been great with just a sprinkle of powdered sugar, I topped it with a rich peanut butter and dark chocolate ganache spiked with Turkish coffee. This gave the cake a layer of silky, fatty, slightly bitter indulgence that worked really well with the warmer flavors.
For one fairly thick 9-inch round cake you will need
2 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1 cup winter squash puree (butternut, pumpkin or even sweet potato will all work, canned or homemade)
1/2 cup white granulated sugar
1/2 cup olive oil
1/4 cup maple syrup
1/4 cup yogurt (unsweetened, non-dairy, preferably a thick coconut yogurt)
Preheat the oven to 350F and line a cake pan with parchment paper (I like to trace the bottom of the pan on parchment paper first then cut out that circle for lining its bottom). Alternatively grease it well with oil or vegan butter, or use cooking spray.
Mix the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda and powder, salt, cinnamon and sugar) in a big bowl, making sure there are no lumps.
Whisk together all the wet ingredients (puree, olive oil, maple syrup and yogurt) in a smaller bowl until the mixture is smooth
Pour wet ingredients into the bowl with dry ingredients and gently mix with a rubber spatula (or a wooden mixing spoon) until no streaks of flour remain. The batter will be fairly thick and glossy.
Transfer the batter to a cake pan and make sure it’s evenly distributed by smoothing the top with a spoon or spatula and knocking it lightly on the counter to fill in any air bubble in the bottom of the pan.
Bake for 25-30 minutes, checking that the middle is cooked before taking it out. By the time it’s done the sides should pull away from the pan edge slightly.
Let cool in the pan for 10 minutes or so then invert on a plate or a wire rack and let cool completely before frosting.
Notes and tips: I made the squash puree at home by pressure cooking the North Georgia roaster until it was very soft then mashing and draining it thoroughly. Canned puree, however, will work just as well as long as the squash is the only listed ingredient. If you’d like to make your own, but don’t own a pressure cooker, simply boil the squash until it falls apart or, for less liquid puree, treat it like you would mashed potatoes.
My ganache approach is really minimal. I break up a dark chocolate bar then boil some milk and pour it over the chocolate just enough to barely cover it. After letting that mixture sit for a minute or two, I whisk it to get a smooth and glossy mixture. At this point I’ll often add a generous dollop of peanut butter, maple syrup to taste or a small sprinkle of finely ground coffee (espresso or Turkish style) to taste. If you do this with canned coconut milk it will be as close as it gets to non-vegan ganache that is typically made with heavy cream. I let the ganache sit until it can be spreadable rather than pourable, but I typically do not whip it or chill it to the point where it would resemble classic American chocolate frosting. The write-up in this recipe, however, will get you there if that’s what you’d like to cover this cake with.
You can switch up the spices here pretty liberally and either use more cinnamon or use the same amount of pumpkin spice. A ¼ teaspoon or less of turmeric would also deepen both the flavor and the color and the same amount of cardamom or cloves would certainly make the cake taste even more warm.