When I think back to my time as a PhD student: Dr Alex Davidson


When I think back to my time as a PhD student at the Royal Holloway CDT in Cyber Security, my overriding feeling is of being thankful for the opportunities that I was presented with. I am not just referring to being given the chance to conduct research in an Information Security department that is internationally renowned for conducting high-quality research. The PhD program provided me with a range of skills that helped to shape my own personal development, and the path that I will follow in the future.

My undergraduate background was in maths, though I worked for a short period of time as a software developer before I started on the PhD program. While I initially began with intentions of carrying out research in the area of game-theoretic modelling of cyber security situations, I altered course in my first year to studying theoretical cryptography (and secure computation). The flexibility of the program was instrumental in me finding an appropriate research topic. Being passionate about your research makes the whole experience far more worthwhile, and so taking the time to find the right topic is essential.

As a PhD student I was given the freedom to decide which areas and research questions within the broader topic that I would like to tackle. This involved working closely with my supervisor on certain problems, whilst also spending time working on problems with other members of the department and fellow students. Being given this working freedom to explore difficult problems --- in addition to learning from academics and peers --- really is a unique experience.

My research was generally theoretical in nature, though I additionally undertook two internships in the Crypto team at the content delivery network Cloudflare. Cloudflare helps to reduce the latency in internet connections between clients and websites by distributing and caching resources in data centres around the world. They also implement various security natures using the strength and size of the network that they use. During my time as an intern I worked on writing a Chrome/Firefox extension called Privacy Pass that allows clients to anonymously bypass challenge mechanisms that disproportionately effectaffect users of anonymity-preserving tools such as Tor and VPNs. This browser extension is now actively used by over 150,000 people. Working on this project was a great experience as it allowed me to apply the knowledge from my research to solve a problem with genuine societal impact.

The advantage of being a member of a well-known research department is that there are people with contacts throughout a number of different industries, and this helped in making these internships possible. My work at Cloudflare was undoubtedly more practically focused, but also resulted in research that eventually made it into my thesis. The two three-month internships helped enormously in framing the impact of the research that I was doing during my PhD. In addition, it was a great experience to take a large period of time to focus on something new.

At the end of my PhD I took a full-time role in the Crypto team at Cloudflare. The Crypto team is mostly research-oriented and attempts to engineer cryptographic solutions to problems in the security and privacy spaces. The team (and company in general) values the time taken to pursue interesting research problems, and so I have been able to keep working on solving difficult problems with real-world impact. Cloudflare serves over 10% of all requests on the internet and so the work that we do also affects the way that the internet runs on a huge scale. Working at the intersection of cryptography and globally distributed systems is not something that I ever would have imagined that I would be doing back when I started at RHUL in 2014.

Finally, it is clear that I would never had these opportunities had I not participated in the CDT, and I am thankful for that. However, my fondest memories of the program relate to the people that I met along the way, and the chances to learn (both personally and academically) that I was exposed to. I would encourage anyone who is currently studying to make the most of these moments to learn and progress, because it is an opportunity that does not come around too often.

The Crypto team --- and Cloudflare as a whole --- are always looking for new people to join as full-time employees, or as interns. If you think that this would be something that you would like to do, then please get in touch! 

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