Section: Overall Objectives

Highlights of the Year

• Extensive study of the hash function proposal Keccak, which has been chosen as the winner of the SHA-3 competition. The analysis of the algebraic properties of Keccak due to C. Boura and A. Canteaut is the best known result on the new hash function standard.

• Design of a variant of the McEliece public-key cipher based on a moderate density parity-check codes (MDPC). This family of codes leads to public keys with a reasonable size and does not weaken the underlying security proof.

• Construction of spatially coupled quantum LDPC codes which performs well under iterative decoding almost up to the coherent capacity of the quantum channel.