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Issues of Provable Security and Efficiency in Cryptographic Constructions

Professor  Rosario Gennaro (T. J. Watson Research Center, New York) will teach a postgraduate course entitled Issues of Provable Security and Efficiency in Cryptographic Constructions. This course is supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia and is is a part of the Seminar on Mathematics Applied to Cryptography.

Timetable

The course will be held from 1 to 9 July 2004. There will be eight sessions:

Location

Hall 005 in building C3 in the Campus Nord of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona.


Topics

Modern Cryptography. Proofs of security by reduction. Construction of cryptographic algorithms from low-level mathematical objects. Black-box constructions. One-way/trapdoor functions and permutations. Hard-core bits.

Examples of black-box cryptographic constructions. Blum-Micali-Yao pseudo-random number generator; Naor-Yung universal one-way hashing; Goldwasser-Micali probabilistic encryption. Proof of security and efficiency of these constructions.

Lower bounds on the efficiency of black-box constructions. Proof of the optimality of the above constructions.

How to improve efficiency. Using specific computational assumptions. Commonly used assumptions: Discrete-log, Diffie-Hellman, Factoring, RSA. Overview of existing schemes based on these assumptions. Efficiency remains close to black-box constructions. Improvements due only to more efficient primitives (e.g. Blum-Blum-Shub generator or Blum-Goldwasser encryption). Can we use specific assumptions to obtain better algorithms?

Improved pseudo-random generation based on factoring and/or discrete log with short exponents. Improved signature schemes based on Strong RSA Assumption. Paillier's encryption scheme (N-residuosity Assumption).

Open problems: Non-black-box constructions? New assumptions? 

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Last Update: May 10, 2004