Taft Seminar on Post-Quantum Cryptography

(Winter 2008 meets Fridays 12:00 - 1:00, 807 Old-Chem building)

For the last three decades, public-key cryptosystems, as a revolutionary breakthrough in cryptography, have completely changed the landscape of our modern communication system and they have developed to be an indispensable part of the foundation of our modern communication system. For the RSA, DSA, ECDSA and similar public key cryptosystems, their security depends on the assumption about the hardness of certain number theory problems, such as the Integer Prime Factorization Problem or the Discrete Logarithm Problem. However, in 1994 Dr. Peter Shor of IBM at the time showed that quantum computers could break all public key cryptosystems which are based on these hard number theory problems. Since then people realize that we need to look ahead to a possible future of quantum computers, and we should begin preparing the cryptographic world for that future. Currently there are four families of public key cryptosystems that have the potential to resist quantum computers: e.g., the multivariate public key cryptosystems, the Lattice--based public Key cryptosystems, the Diffie-Lamport-Merkle public Key cryptosystems, and the McEliece Public Key cryptosystems. Among these four, the first two are commonly thought to be of most promising due to their rigid mathematical structures and their high efficiency in practical applications.

Program

Autumn 2007:  Professor Bo-Yin Yang from the Institute of Information Science of Academia Sinica in Taiwan, an expert in the area of multivariate public key cryptosystems, in particular fast polynomial solving algorithms like the Groebner basis, will give lectures in new combinatorial ideas and methods in this direction.

Winter 2007: Professor Johannes Buchamnn from the Department of Computer Sciences at Technical University of Darmstadt is an expert in the area of the post-quantum cryptography, and he will lecture on the new methods and idea in this area, in particular, the hash based signature schemes.

Spring 2008: Professor Lei Hu from the Chinese Academy of Sciences is an expert in the area of multivariate public key cryptosystems, in particular in the fast implementation of various algorithms. Besides lecturing in new techniques in implementations, we hope to work with him to implement some of the new ideas we hope to develop through the work with the previous two researchers by combining different methods from the multivariate public key cryptosystems other cryptosystems.