•   When: Friday, October 14, 2022 from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM
•   Speakers: Chris Peikert
•   Location: Research Hall 163
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Abstract:

 Since the advent of modern (public-key) cryptography in the mid 1970s, security has almost entirely relied on the belief that a few special mathematical problems, like factoring large integers, are infeasible to solve. What if this belief is wrong?

 Our faith has been tested since 1994, when Shor showed how to break all widely used public-key cryptosystems using a quantum computer (of sufficient size). While real quantum computers are still in their early stages, they are advancing rapidly, and future ones would be able to decrypt today's encrypted communications.

 Coincidentally(?), soon after Shor's work, cryptosystems based on the entirely different mathematics of (point) lattices were proposed. To start, they were poorly understood, inefficient, and had limited capabilities—but they also had unique and compelling theoretical properties, including apparent resistance to quantum attacks. Today, they have been selected for standardization and deployment by NIST and other organizations, and they are also expanding the frontier of advanced functionality across cryptography.

 This talk will survey how, over the course of 25 years, lattice-based cryptosystems grew from theoretical curiosities to real-world standards for the quantum future. And it will look ahead, to speculate how today's theory might affect practice in the coming decades.