Internship Experience: Cryptography Engineer
Back in the summer of 2017 I was an intern at Cloudflare. During the scholastic year I was a graduate student working on automorphic forms and computational Langlands at Berkeley: a part of number theory with deep connections to representation theory, aimed at uncovering some of the deepest facts about number fields. I had also gotten involved in Internet standardization and security research, but much more on the applied side.
While I had published papers in computer security and had coded for my dissertation, building and deploying new protocols to production systems was going to be new. Going from the academic environment of little day to day supervision to the industrial one of more direction; from greenfield code that would only ever be run by one person to large projects that had to be understandable by a team; from goals measured in years or even decades, to goals measured in days, weeks, or quarters; these transitions would present some challenges.
Cloudflare at that stage was a very different company from what it is now. Entire products and offices simply did not exist. Argo, now a mainstay of our offering for sophisticated companies, was slowly emerging. Access, which Continue reading
