Good Blessings - Susam Pal

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2024-03-29 09:30:04

Back in 2009, I had completed a year working for RSA Security. I was then looking for more intellectually stimulating work where I could work on projects involving mathematics and algorithms. While I had talked to senior leaders of the organisation about my aspirations, nothing concrete had materialised for several weeks. Then something interesting happened. One fine Monday morning, as I walked into the office and began to settle at my desk, the head of our research and development division came to my desk looking for me. He said, "Burt is here. He wants to talk to you."

There was no Burt in that office as far as I knew, so I became a little confused. I was led into a conference room where I could meet him. Mildly disoriented, I opened the conference room door. Then I saw Burt, the person I was about to meet. As soon as I saw him, I immediately recognised who he was. He was Dr Burt Kaliski, the Chief Scientist of RSA Laboratories. He had flown in that morning to meet certain teams in our office. During his visit, he had carved out some time from his schedule to meet me.

I had never met or talked to Dr Kaliski before. But I was very well aware of his work and his accomplishments many years before joining RSA. At a previous job, while implementing digital signatures for a banking product, I had spent a lot of time reading the RFCs for PKCS #1, PKCS #5, and PKCS #7, which were all authored by Dr Kaliski. It was an honour to meet the person whose work had taught me a lot and helped me begin my career as a software developer in the area of information security.