Section: Overall Objectives

Highlights

Cryptanalysis of several hash functions proposed to the SHA-3 competition: this international competition, launched by the American National Institute of Standards and Technology, aims at selecting a new standard for hash functions(http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/hash/sha-3/ ). The revision of the current standard FIPS 180-2 has actually been decided by NIST in response to the recent attacks against almost all existing hash functions (e.g. MD5, SHA-0, SHA-1). Among the 64 hash function proposals submitted to the SHA-3 competition, several candidates have been cryptanalyzed by some researchers of the project-team. More recently, we have provided a deep study of the algebraic properties of some of the finalists of the competition.

Discovery of a distinguishing property for the family of Goppa codes which are used in the original McEliece cipher and the CFS signature scheme. Even if it does not lead to an attack, this property invalidates the previously known security proofs of these systems. Among the many families of linear codes which have been considered for code-based cryptography, Goppa codes seemed to be the only safe one. Now even Goppa codes seem to be questioned.

Organization of the WCC international conference, which was held in Paris in April 2011. This was the seventh in the series of biannual workshops on Coding and Cryptography.