Free Nonsense

Cough drops

By André Pereira*

I will start this “Free Nonsense” by telling you some of the most important moments in my career and life. I was born in 1989 in the Hospital of Santo Tirso, Portugal, my hometown. In May 2014 I started working at INESC TEC and on 16 October around 3.47 pm, Adi Shamir gave me two cough drops.

For those of you who don’t know, Adi Shamir is a cryptography specialist, and co-inventor of the RSA, with which he won the Turing award (the Nobel prize of computer science) in 2002. At some point in his life, he was not allowed to leave the United States, for fear that he would be “exporting” American cryptography.

This story started when I was chosen to present a paper I wrote as part of my master’s degree at the European Black Hat, which took place in Amsterdam. This conference gathers IT safety experts and enthusiasts from all over the world. At the event we are advised not to use electronic devices in the building, otherwise something might end up on the cloud.

Honestly, I was quite nervous. After all, there were two thousand people at the conference. Around 3 pm I was watching the presentation before mine. If the presentation was amazing I would be nervous. It was no big deal, but still that didn’t help. Around 3.30 pm I started doing my presentation.

I went into concentration mode. In my head all was doing well, but I guess I need to see the footage. At a certain point I had coughing fit and for a few moments I coughed every ten seconds, which was really annoying. Then I see a person from the audience coming towards me, who offered my cough drops saying “take this, take two”. It was Shamir.

It was so strange. A few years back I was studying his algorithms in cryptography class, and now he’s giving me cough drops… For him it was completely normal, but for me it was an extraordinary experience. I will milk this story in various dinners and similar events.

*Researcher at INESC TEC’s Centre for Research and Advanced Computing Systems (CRACS)