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Workshop on Mathematics of Information - Theoretic Cryptography
(19 - 30 September 2016)

Jointly organized with Nanyang Technological University

 

Organizing Committee · Visitors and Participants · Overview · Activities · Venue

 

 Organizing Committee

 


 Visitors and Participants

 

 

 Overview

In recent years, there has been a surge in interactions between information-theoretic cryptography and several areas in mathematics -- algebraic geometry, algebraic number theory, coding theory, combinatorics and probability theory. The primary focus of our program is organized around certain concrete, exciting developments that have recently fueled and deepened these particular interactions.


The program will further foster and strengthen the emerging international research community on the intersection between cryptography, theory of computation and pure mathematics.  By bringing together leading researchers as well as talented junior researchers from the relevant areas, we expect to advance the state of knowledge on several open  questions of distinctly cross-disciplinary nature. These are typically questions that arise in one area but that turn out to pertain, after taking a proper perspective, to another area. Moreover, quite often the answer to such questions advances both areas at the same time. This explains why it is interesting for experts from several different areas to join this workshop.


Cryptography studies methods pertaining to secure communications or to secure processing of data. Today, cryptography, as a science, is tightly connected with other areas of science, notably, mathematics, physics, applied and theoretical computer science, and even (hardware) engineering. One well-known example that has its roots in the 1970s, is public key cryptography and it is deeply linked  with computational number theory. This interconnection process between cryptography and other fields commenced several decades ago, and continues to gather new momentum time and again, often in unforeseen ways – connections are still growing in volume, in number of directions, as well as in depth.


Information-theoretic security is an area in cryptography that investigates methods whose security does not rely on assumptions about computational intractability of mathematical problems, and therefore it contributes in particular to our understanding of what cryptography is possible in a "post-quantum" world. Moreover, cryptography based on complexity theory is also well-known to benefit from information-theoretic methods. Important cryptographic functionalities that are realizable with information-theoretic security include:

  • Secure General Multi-Party Computation using secure channels or correlated sources of randomness. This can in principle be used to solve multi-lateral security problems in general.
  • Privacy Amplification ("almost-uniform randomness extraction"), i.e., "modding out" partial information on secret keys that has leaked away to adversarial parties.
  • Private Information Retrieval.
  • Two-Party Oblivious Transfer in the (quantum) bounded storage model.
  • Secret Key-Establishment with "everlasting security" in the (quantum) bounded storage model. Also in the "satellite model".
  • Encryption and Authentication in the shared-key model, a classic: combinatorial authentication codes, one-time pad.


In principle, information-theoretically secure cryptography offers a defense even against a computationally- all-powerful adversary. For instance, security is derived from some given upper bound on the number of processors an adversary is capable of corrupting, a physical source of correlated randomness, a given (huge) (quantum)-memory bound that constrains the otherwise-all-powerful adversary or from the laws of quantum physics. To facilitate the public key cryptography functionality in a post-quantum world, cryptography studies complexity-theoretic methods whose security should stand even in the face of a quantum attacker, with methods from hardness assumptions based on integer lattices showing much promise at present. Contradictory as though this may seem at first sight, technical tools from information- theoretic cryptography have been very instrumental in complexity-based cryptography as well.

Mathematically, the area of information-theoretically secure cryptography has deep links with algebraic number theory and geometry, probability theory, information theory, (arithmetic) combinatorics and coding theory.

Our workshop is the third in a series of workshops on Mathematics of Information-Theoretic Cryptography.
The previous two workshops were held in:


This new series of workshops evolved from an ealier series of three broadly themed workshops on Mathematics of Cryptography, which were held in:

  • Catalan Research Center for Mathematics (CRM) at UPC (Barcelona, Spain), 22 - 26 September 2008
  • Catalan Research Center for Mathematics (CRM) at UAB (Bellaterra, Spain), 20 - 22 June 2005
  • Lorentz Center at Leiden University (Leiden, The Netherlands),
    22 - 26 September (school) & 26 September - 2 October (workshop), 2003
    http://www.lorentzcenter.nl/lc/web///2003/98/info.php3?wsid=98

 Activities

 


    Tutorial Speakers

  • Yevgeniy Dodis (New York University, USA)
  • Stefan Dziembowski (University of Warsaw, Poland)
  • Antoine Joux (University Pierre and Marie Curie, France)
  • Phong Nguyen (The University of Tokyo, Japan)
  • Ignacio Cascudo Pueyo (Aarhus University, Denmark)
  • Luca Trevisan (The University of California at Berkeley, USA)

    Keynote Speakers

  • Peter Beelen (Technical University of Denmark, Denmark)
  • Stefan Dziembowski (University of Warsaw, Poland)
  • Serge Fehr (Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, The Netherlands)
  • Moni Naor (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel)
  • Rafail Ostrovsky (University of California, Los Angeles, USA)
  • Stefano Tessaro (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA)
  • Hoeteck Wee (École Normale Supérieure, France)
  • Moti Yung (Snapchat and Columbia University, USA)

 

 

 Venue

 


Organizing Committee · Visitors and Participants · Overview · Activities · Venue

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