GRACE has two broad application domains—cryptography and coding theory—linked by a common foundation in algorithmic number theory and the geometry of algebraic curves. In our research, which combines theoretical work with practical software development, we use algebraic curves to create better cryptosystems, to provide better security assessments for cryptographic key sizes, and to build the best error-correcting codes.
Coding and cryptography deal (in different ways) with securing communication systems for high-level applications. In our research, the two domains are linked by the computational issues related to algebraic curves (over various fields) and arithmetic rings. These fundamental number-theoretic algorithms, at the crossroads of a rich area of mathematics and computer science, have already proven their relevance in public key cryptography, with industrial successes including the RSA cryptosystem and elliptic curve cryptography. It is less well-known that the same branches of mathematics can be used to build very good codes for error correction. While coding theory has traditionally had an electrical engineering flavour, recent developments in computer science have shed new light on coding theory, leading to new applications more central to computer science.
Algorithmic Number Theory is concerned with replacing special cases with general algorithms to solve problems in number theory. In the Grace project, it appears in three main threads:
fundamental algorithms for integers and polynomials (including primality and factorization);
algorithms for finite fields (including discrete logarithms); and
algorithms for algebraic curves.
Clearly, we use computer algebra in many ways. Research in cryptology has motivated a renewed interest in Algorithmic Number Theory in recent decades—but the fundamental problems still exist per se. Indeed, while algorithmic number theory application in cryptanalysis is epitomized by applying factorization to breaking RSA public key, many other problems, are relevant to various area of computer science. Roughly speaking, the problems of the cryptological world are of bounded size, whereas Algorithmic Number Theory is also concerned with asymptotic results.
Theme: Arithmetic Geometry: Curves and their Jacobians Arithmetic Geometry is the meeting point of algebraic geometry and number theory: that is, the study of geometric objects defined over arithmetic number systems (such as the integers and finite fields). The fundamental objects for our applications in both coding theory and cryptology are curves and their Jacobians over finite fields.
An algebraic plane curve
(Not every curve is planar—we may have more variables, and more
defining equations—but from an algorithmic point of view,
we can always reduce to the plane setting.)
The genus
The simplest curves with nontrivial Jacobians are
curves of genus 1,
known as elliptic curves;
they are typically defined by equations of the form
Theme: Curve-Based Cryptology
Jacobians of curves are excellent candidates for cryptographic groups when constructing efficient instances of public-key cryptosystems. Diffie–Hellman key exchange is an instructive example.
Suppose Alice and Bob want to establish a secure communication
channel. Essentially, this means establishing a common secret
key, which they will then use for encryption and decryption.
Some decades ago, they would have exchanged this key in person, or
through some trusted intermediary; in the modern, networked world,
this is typically impossible, and in any case completely unscalable.
Alice and Bob may be anonymous parties who want to do e-business, for
example, in which case they cannot securely meet, and they have no way
to be sure of each other's identities. Diffie–Hellman key exchange
solves this problem. First, Alice and Bob publicly agree on a
cryptographic group
This simple protocol has been in use, with only minor modifications,
since the 1970s. The challenge is to create examples of groups
The classic example of a group suitable for the Diffie–Hellman protocol
is the multiplicative group of a finite field
This is where Jacobians of algebraic curves come into their own.
First, elliptic curves and Jacobians of genus 2 curves do not have a
subexponential index calculus algorithm: in particular, from the point
of view of the DLP, a generic elliptic curve is currently as
strong as a generic group of the same size. Second, they provide
some diversity: we have many degrees of freedom in choosing
curves over a fixed
Theme: Coding theory
Coding Theory studies originated with the idea of using redundancy in messages to protect against noise and errors. The last decade of the 20th century has seen the success of so-called iterative decoding methods, which enable us to get very close to the Shannon capacity. The capacity of a given channel is the best achievable transmission rate for reliable transmission. The consensus in the community is that this capacity is more easily reached with these iterative and probabilistic methods than with algebraic codes (such as Reed–Solomon codes).
However, algebraic coding is useful in settings other than the Shannon context. Indeed, the Shannon setting is a random case setting, and promises only a vanishing error probability. In contrast, the algebraic Hamming approach is a worst case approach: under combinatorial restrictions on the noise, the noise can be adversarial, with strictly zero errors.
These considerations are renewed by the topic of list decoding after the breakthrough of Guruswami and Sudan at the end of the nineties. List decoding relaxes the uniqueness requirement of decoding, allowing a small list of candidates to be returned instead of a single codeword. List decoding can reach a capacity close to the Shannon capacity, with zero failure, with small lists, in the adversarial case. The method of Guruswami and Sudan enabled list decoding of most of the main algebraic codes: Reed–Solomon codes and Algebraic–Geometry (AG) codes and new related constructions “capacity-achieving list decodable codes”. These results open the way to applications again adversarial channels, which correspond to worst case settings in the classical computer science language.
Another avenue of our studies is AG codes over various geometric objects. Although Reed–Solomon codes are the best possible codes for a given alphabet, they are very limited in their length, which cannot exceed the size of the alphabet. AG codes circumvent this limitation, using the theory of algebraic curves over finite fields to construct long codes over a fixed alphabet. The striking result of Tsfasman–Vladut–Zink showed that codes better than random codes can be built this way, for medium to large alphabets. Disregarding the asymptotic aspects and considering only finite length, AG codes can be used either for longer codes with the same alphabet, or for codes with the same length with a smaller alphabet (and thus faster underlying arithmetic).
From a broader point of view, wherever Reed–Solomon codes are used, we can substitute AG codes with some benefits: either beating random constructions, or beating Reed–Solomon codes which are of bounded length for a given alphabet.
Another area of Algebraic Coding Theory with which we are more recently concerned is the one of Locally Decodable Codes. After having been first theoretically introduced, those codes now begin to find practical applications, most notably in cloud-based remote storage systems.
D. Augot made a presentation at a one day workshop “Blockchain
Technology for Cybersecurity and Social Impact” at Berkeley's CITRIS
https://
D. Augot was co-chair of the Program Commitee of WCC 2017 (St Petersburg, Russia).
In the context of NIST's call for post quantum cryptography:
https://
members of the team participated to two sumbissions:
A. Couvreur and E. Barelli participated to the submission of BIG QUAKE proposal :
L. De Feo participated to the submission of SIKE proposal:
Algorithmic Coding Theory in Sage
Functional Description: The aim of this project is to vastly improve the state of the error correcting library in Sage. The existing library does not present a good and usable API, and the provided algorithms are very basic, irrelevant, and outdated. We thus have two directions for improvement: renewing the APIs to make them actually usable by researchers, and incorporating efficient programs for decoding, like J. Nielsen's CodingLib, which contains many new algorithms.
Partner: Technical University Denmark
Contact: Daniel Augot
Keyword: Algebraic decoding
Functional Description: Decoding is a standalone C library. Its primary goal is to implement Guruswami–Sudan list decoding-related algorithms, as efficiently as possible. Its secondary goal is to give an efficient tool for the implementation of decoding algorithms (not necessarily list decoding algorithms) and their benchmarking.
Participant: Guillaume Quintin
Contact: Daniel Augot
Keyword: Cryptography
Functional Description: A competitive, high-speed, open implementation of the Diffie–Hellman protocol, targeting the 128-bit security level on Intel platforms. This download contains Magma files that demonstrate how to compute scalar multiplications on the x-line of an elliptic curve using endomorphisms. This accompanies the EuroCrypt 2014 paper by Costello, Hisil and Smith, the full version of which can be found here: http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/692 . The corresponding SUPERCOP-compatible crypto_dh application can be downloaded from http://hhisil.yasar.edu.tr/files/hisil20140318compact.tar.gz .
Participant: Benjamin Smith
Contact: Benjamin Smith
URL: http://
Crible Algébrique: Distribution, Optimisation - Number Field Sieve
Keywords: Cryptography - Number theory
Functional Description: CADO-NFS is a complete implementation in C/C++ of the Number Field Sieve (NFS) algorithm for factoring integers and computing discrete logarithms in finite fields. It consists in various programs corresponding to all the phases of the algorithm, and a general script that runs them, possibly in parallel over a network of computers.
Participants: Pierrick Gaudry, Emmanuel Thomé and Paul Zimmermann
Contact: Emmanuel Thomé
B. Smith and Joost Renes (Radboud University, NL) developed qDSA, a new digital signature scheme targeting constrained devices, typically microcontrollers with extremely limited memory. An article describing qDSA was presented at ASIACRYPT 2017, and a reference implementation software package has been placed into the public domain.
J. Lavauzelle presented a construction of Private Information Retrieval (PIR) protocols from combinatorial structures called transversal designs. The construction features low computation and low storage overhead for the servers. For some instances, adequate communication between servers and user is achieved. The PIR scheme also generalizes to colluding servers. The construction has been presented during WCC 2017 , and in a poster session in the Munich Workshop in Coding and Applications.
E. Barelli presented at WCC 2017 (Workshop on Coding and Cryptography, St Petersburg, Russia) her recent results on the analysis of McEliece scheme based on alternant codes with a non trivial automorphism group . These codes were suggested for public key encryption since, compared to codes with trivial automorphism group, they could provide shorter keys.
If the security with respect to generic decoding attacks is almost unchanged when considering codes with non trivial automorphisms, E. Barelli proved that the security with respect to key recovery attacks is highly reduced since, it reduces to recover the structure of the subcode of fixed elements by the automorphism group.
In a collaboration with Peter Beelen, Mrinmoy Datta, Vincent Neiger and Johan Rosenkilde (DTU Copenhagen), E. Barelli obtained improved lower bounds for the minimum distance of some algebraic geometry codes from Giulietti Korchmaros curves .
In a collaboration with Christine Bachoc and Gilles Zémor (University
of Bordeaux), A. Couvreur obtained a characterisation of subspaces
where
Theorem.
Let
Then
either
or
In the context of NIST's call for post quantum cryptosystems:
https://
A. Couvreur and E. Barelli participated to the submission BIG QUAKE (BInary Goppa QUAsi–cyclic Key Encapsulation). The proposal consists in a public key encryption scheme (with a conversion to a Key Encapsulation Mechanism) using binary quasi–cyclic Goppa codes.
The details on the proposal are on the following website.
The best discrete logarithm record computations in prime fields and large characteristic finite fields are obtained with Number Field Sieve algorithm (NFS) at the moment.
A. Guillevic, L. Grémy, F. Morain and E. Thomé (from CARAMBA EPC in LORIA) computed a discrete log on a curve of embedding degree 6 and cryptographic size. This clearly showed that curves with small embedding degrees are indeed weak. The article was presented by L. Grémy during the SAC 2017 conference in Ottawa.
D. Augot and W. George in collaboration with Hervé Chabanne (Safran
Identity and Security, ex Morpho, now Idemia) designed two schemes to
allow users to authenticate using so-called anonymous credentials,
issues by an identity provider. We used Brands anonymous credentials
with selective disclosure each time, first for a finely tuned, user
managed, identity scheme , second for a more
classical high throughput scheme , inspired
by CONIKS https://
D. Augot, with Célia Zolynski, is co-advising Hanna-Mae Bisserier, a PhD student law, on the impact of blockchains on legal systems. The PhD is in law, and D. Augot only gives scientific and technological explanations, while the direction of the thesis is done by Célia Zolynski.
NOKIA BELL LABS
New PhD student H. Khazaie is funded by ADR with NOKIA BELL LABS. The PhD topic is the security of distributed storage systems.
Post doctoral researcher N. Coxon is funded by ADR with NOKIA BELL LABS. The post doc topic is an information theoretically secure private information retrieval scheme.
SAFRAN Identity and Security (Ex Morpho and now Idemia)
Post doctoral researcher W. George is funded by Idemia to design an identity management scheme based on Bitcoin's blockchain.
MANTA (accepted July 2015, starting March 2016): “Curves, surfaces, codes and cryptography”. This project deals with applications of coding theory error correcting codes to in cryptography, multi-party computation, and complexity theory, using advanced topics in algebraic geometry and number theory. The kickoff was a one week-retreat in Dordogne (20 participants), and we had another four day meeting in Saclay in November 17. See http://anr-manta.inria.fr/.
Title: Post-quantum cryptography for long-term security
Programm: H2020
Duration: March 2015 - March 2018
Coordinator: TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITEIT EINDHOVEN
Partners:
Academia Sinica (Taiwan)
Bundesdruckerei (Germany)
Danmarks Tekniske Universitet (Denmark)
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium)
Nxp Semiconductors Belgium Nv (Belgium)
Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum (Germany)
Stichting Katholieke Universiteit (Netherlands)
Coding Theory and Cryptology group, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (Netherlands)
Technische Universitaet Darmstadt (Germany)
University of Haifa (Israel)
Inria contact: Nicolas Sendrier
Online security depends on a very few underlying cryptographic algorithms. Public-key algorithms are particularly crucial since they provide digital signatures and establish secure communication. Essentially all applications today are based on RSA or on the discrete-logarithm problem in finite fields or on elliptic curves. Cryptographers optimize parameter choices and implementation details for these systems and build protocols on top of these systems; cryptanalysts fine-tune attacks and establish exact security levels for these systems.
It might seem that having three systems offers enough variation, but these systems are all broken as soon as large quantum computers are built. The EU and governments around the world are investing heavily in building quantum computers; society needs to be prepared for the consequences, including cryptanalytic attacks accelerated by these computers. Long-term confidential documents such as patient health-care records and state secrets have to guarantee security for many years, but information encrypted today using RSA or elliptic curves and stored until quantum computers are available will then be as easy to decipher.
PQCRYPTO will allow users to switch to post-quantum cryptography: cryptographic systems that are not merely secure for today but that will also remain secure long-term against attacks by quantum computers. PQCRYPTO will design a portfolio of high-security post-quantum public-key systems, and will improve the speed of these systems, with reference implementations.
Our team is engaged in WP3.3 “advanced applications for the cloud”. We envision to focus essentially on secure multiparty computation, essentially the information theoretically secure constructions, who are naturally secure against a quantum computer invoked on classical queries. We will study whether these protocols still resist quantum queries. This work sub package started March 2015, and is dealt with by D. Augot.
B. Smith has continued our successful informal partnership with the cryptography research group at Radboud University, Nijmegen (NL). 2017 has seen visits from researchers in both directions, and the production of the qDSA signature scheme package.
Beth Malmskog (Colorado College) visited the team from November 27 to December 1 2017 and gave a talk on locally recoverable codes based on fibre products of algebraic curves.
B. Smith was an invited researcher in the Computer Science department at CINVESTAV (Mexico City, Mexico) for the month of August 2017, hosted by Professor Francisco Rodríguez Henríquez.
J. Lavauzelle visited Incidence Geometry team at Gent University (Belgium) for the month of April 2017, hosted by Professor Leo Storme.
E. Barelli visited the COMPUTE team in the DTU University at Lyngby (Danemark) during one month in february-march 2017, hosted by Professor Peter Beelen.
B. Smith was a member of the organizing committee and Short Talk Chair for IEEE EuroS&P 2017 (Paris, April 2017)
D. Augot was co-chair of Workshop on Coding and Cryptography (WCC) 2017 at St Petersburg (Russia).
B. Smith: Latincrypt 2017, ECC (International Workshop on Elliptic Curve Cryptography) 2017.
D. Augot and A. Couvreur : Fifth Code-based Cryptography Workshop 2017, Tenerife, Spain.
A. Couvreur: WCC 2017 (Workshop on Coding and Cryptography 2017, St Petersbug, Russia).
A. Couvreur : AGC
D. Augot: International Conference on Mathematical
Aspects of Computer and Information Sciences
https://
B. Smith: IFIPSEC2017, Africacrypt 2017, WCC 2017, Asiacrypt 2017, Eurocrypt 2017, MACIS 2017, PKC 2018
J. Lavauzelle: MACIS 2017
A. Couvreur: Crypto 2017, Eurocrypt 2017, ISIT 2017.
F. Morain is member of the editorial board of the Applicable Algebra in Engineering, Communication and Computing, Springer.
B. Smith: Theory of Computing Systems, Springer Women in Mathematics, Research in Number Theory, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Journal of Cryptographic Engineering.
A. Couvreur: IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, IEEE Transactions on Communication, Journal of Number Theory, SIAM Journal on Applied Algebra and Geometry.
B. Smith was an invited speaker at the annual FMF Symposium, a public science event at Universiteit Groningen (Groningen, NL, November 2017)
B. Smith was an invited speaker in the SIAM Applied Algebraic Geometry minisymposium on Applications of Computational Algebraic Geometry to Cryptology (Atlanta, USA, August 2017).
B. Smith was an invited speaker at the FoCM workshop on Computational Number Theory (Barcelona, ES, July 2017)
B. Smith was an invited speaker at the Summer School on Real-World Crypto and Privacy (Sibenik, HR, June 2017)
B. Smith was an invited speaker at JeudiX, a public science outreach event of École polytechnique (Paris, January 2017)
D. Augot is member of the scientific committee of the CCA seminar, “Codage, Cryptographie et Algorithms”, https://
D. Augot, with Bernadette Charron-Bost, is heading the scientific committee of the Blocksem seminar at Polytechnique, on blockchains, http://
D. Augot, with Fabrice Le Fessant, organised the Open Source Spring on blockchains http://
F. Morain is vice-head of the Département d'informatique of Ecole Polytechnique.
F. Morain is member of the Board of Master Parisien de Recherche en Informatique (MPRI).
A. Couvreur is member of LIX's Conseil de laboratoire.
B. Smith was the International Correspondant for CRI Saclay.
B. Smith was a member of the COST-GTRI.
D. Augot is elected member of the “conseil académique consultatif” de Paris-Saclay.
D. Augot was in the “comité de sélection” for a “maître de conférences” position in Grenoble
D. Augot was heading the “comité de sélection” for a “maître de conférences” position in Rouen
Licence:
B. Smith, Computer Programming (CSE101), 23h EqTD, L1, École polytechnique, France
J. Lavauzelle, 1I001, Éléments de programmation, tutorial class (17.5h equiv TD), L1, Université Pierre et Marie Curie
J. Lavauzelle, 2I003, Initiation à l'algorithmique, tutorial class (47.5h equiv TD), L2, Université Pierre et Marie Curie
A. Couvreur and E. Barelli, INF411, ”Les bases de la programmation et de l'algorithmique“, 21.3h (equiv TD), 2nd year (L3), Ecole Polytechnique, France.
E. Barelli, INF311, ”Introduction à l'informatique“, 26.7h(equiv TD), 1st year, Ecole Polytechnique, France.
Master:
B. Smith, Advanced Cryptology (INF568), 55h EqTD, M1, École polytechnique, France
B. Smith and F. Morain, Algorithmes Arithmétiques pour la Cryptologie (2-12-2), 20h EqTD, M2, Master Parisien de Recherche en Informatique (MPRI), France
A. Couvreur and F. Morain, Introduction to Cryptology (INF558), 40h, M1, École polytechnique, France
A. Couvreur, Error Correcting Codes and Applications to Cryptography, (2-13-2), 15h, M2, MPRI, FRANCE
Master 2 intern
D. Augot was the director of Rémi Clarisse internship on the Chor-Rivest cryptosystem
Students project
D. Augot was managing two groups of polytechniques students on their own project: one about a voting system based on homomorphic encryption (with CEA List), the second about a medical kidney exchange scheme secured and enforced by the Hyperledger/fabric blockchain (with Orange)
PhD : Cyril Hugounenq, Volcans et calcul d'isogénies, Université Paris Saclay, 25/09/2017, F. Morain& L. Goubin & L. De Feo.
D. Augot
examinator of the PhD defense of Sarah Kamel, “Sécurité pour les réseaux sans fil”, le 10 mars 2017 (Télécom Paris Tech)
examinator of the PhD defense of Francisco Vial-Prado, “Contributions to the design and analysis of fully homomorphic encryption schemes, le 12 juin 2017 (Université Versailles Saint-Quentin)
examinator of the PhD defense of Vlad Dragoi “Approche algébrique pour l'étude et la résolution de problèmes algorithmiques issus de la cryptographie et de la théorie des codes”, le 6 juillet 2017 (University of Rouen).
examinator of the PhD defense of Mohamed A. M. Saeed Taha “Algebraic Approach for Code Equivalence”, le 18 décembre 2017 (University of Rouen).
A. Couvreur
PhD : Hervé Talé Kalachi (University of Rouen).
Agrégation de Mathématiques.
A. Couvreur gave the Conférence inaugurale of the Semaine des mathématiques in the accadémie de Créteil: Cryptographie, le langage des secrets.