Rahil Arora

Security | Fitness | Mindfulness

Expectation, Desire, and Necessity

04 June 2023

The less we expect, the happier we are! Stoics use this as one of their core values to live a purposeful life. They recommend that we focus on what we can control, and let go of expectations around things that are beyond our control. This is something most of us already know, and yet we struggle to manage our expectations. Why is that?

I think the the answer is our lack of awareness. Our brain cannot...

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Ritual vs Habit

28 January 2022

A ritual always has an intention and often consists of a rigid sequence of behaviors often performed in the same order. We always think of this intention before we perform a ritual at any given point. Rituals are a great way to calm down inner chatter and negative manifestations of inner voice. Rituals provide us with a sense of order by giving us an illusion of control.

Many athletes perform certain rituals to calm their nerves...

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Curiosity

26 January 2022

Curiosity is a superpower. Through curiosity, it is possible to understand and learn anything in the world. Curiosity is what helps us dig deeper and ask questions.

Well, what if someone is not naturally curious? Self reflection helps identify any gaps in our knowledge. Gaps in our knowledge lead to curiosity. Curiosity is fueled once we know enough to know that we do not know. It is habit forming once we start treating any question we...

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Fear vs Doubt

24 October 2021

In this short post, I’ll share why I think fear is generally good and self-doubt is not. This post is inspired by one of the chapters in the book Winning: The Unforgiving Race to Greatness by Tim Grover where Tim makes some very convincing arguments in favor of Fear and how it is very common in top athletes he’s trained.

"Fear is excitement without breath." - Robert Heller

Fear is of something unknown,...

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A Sad Story of SSL

01 November 2015

Back when I was pursuing my Master’s, I gave a small presentation on how SSL/TLS protocol has been affected by various protocol specific attacks, how these issues have been patched, and, most importantly, what could have prevented SSL/TLS from these attacks. I tried explaining these issues in the form a “story”. Since I’ve not been able to write anything new, I thought it’d be a good idea to share this presentation here. Here is the presentation...

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Same-Origin Policy & the Ways Around

28 June 2015

Same Origin Policy is one of the most important security concepts implemented in all modern browsers. It is a set of mechanisms which control how a script loaded from one origin can interact with a resource from another origin. Mozilla Developer Network provides a good summary of Same Origin Policy. It permits an origin to send information to another origin, but does not permit an origin to receive information from another origin. In short, it...

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