Section: Research Program

Quantum-Safe Cryptography

The security of almost all public-key cryptographic protocols in use today relies on the presumed hardness of problems from number theory such as factoring and computing discrete logarithms. This is problematic because these problems have very similar underlying structure, and its unforeseen exploit can render all currently used public-key cryptography insecure. This structure was in fact exploited by Shor to construct efficient quantum algorithms that break all hardness assumptions from number theory that are currently in use. And so naturally, an important area of research is to build provably secure protocols based on mathematical problems that are unrelated to factoring and discrete log. One of the most promising directions in this line of research is using lattice problems as a source of computational hardness, which also offer features that other alternative public-key cryptosystems (such as MQ-based, code-based or hash-based schemes) cannot provide.