Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

Regional Initiatives

PEPS PAIP

From late 2012 through 2013, D. Augot was heavily involved in the preparation of the Institut de la société du numérique (Digital Society Institute) proposal within IDEX Paris-Saclay. Led by N. Boujemaa, this proposal aims to be a catalyst for interdisciplinary research (involving computer scientists and researchers from the humanities) on societal challenges inherent to eLife/life digitization. The proposal has initial funding from the IDEX, and will hopefully be self-funding within three years. Two kick-off projects were defined: joint human & machine interaction, and privacy and digital identity.

Within IDEX Paris-Saclay, the PAIP (Pour une Approche Interdisciplinaire de la Privacy) project was proposed and accepted in September 2013, with a small budget (30 keuros) for all the partners of the privacy group.

D. Augot engaged in monthly brainstorming meetings with researchers from Inria Paris–Rocquencourt (project-team SMIS), Université Jean Monnet's ADIS and CERDI labs (A. Rallet, A. Bensamoun), and Télécom ParisTech (C. Levallois-Barth). Topics under discussion include terms of service of various cloud storage providers; SMIS's TrustedCell secure token initiative for helding private and secure personal data; privacy leaks; and measurements on smartphones.

A one-day conference was held in Paris in December 2014.

PEPS Aije-Bitcoin

Within the group PAIP (Pour une Approche Interdisciplinaire de la Privacy), D. Augot presented the cryptographic and peer-to-peer principles at the heart of the Bitcoin protocol (electronic signature, hash functions, and so on). Most of the information is publicly available: the history of all transactions, evolution of the source code, developers' mailing lists, and the Bitcoin exchange rate. It was recognized by the economists in our group that such an amount of data is very rare for an economic phenomenon, and it was decided to start research on the history of Bitcoin, to study the interplay between the development of protocol and the development of the economical phenomenon.

The project Aije-Bitcoin (analyse informatique, juridique et économique de Bitcoin) was accepted as interdisciplinary research for a PEPS (Projet exploratoire Premier Soutien) cofunded by the CNRS and Université de Paris-Saclay. This one-year preliminary program will enable the group to master the understanding of Bitcoin from various angles, allowing more advanced research in the following years.

IDEALCODES

Idealcodes is a two-year Digiteo research project, started in October 2014. The partners involved are the École Polytechnique (X) and the Université de Versailles–Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (Luca de Feo, UVSQ). It funds one two-year post-doc, J. Nielsen, working at the boundary between coding theory, cryptography, and computer algebra.

Idealcodes spans the three research areas of algebraic coding theory, cryptography, and computer algebra, by investigating the problem of lattice reduction (and root-finding). In algebraic coding theory this is found in Guruswami and Sudan's list decoding of algebraic geometry codes and Reed–Solomon codes. In cryptography, it is found in Coppersmith's method for finding small roots of integer equations. These topics were unified and generalised by H. Cohn and N. Heninger  [36] , by considering algebraic geometry codes and number field codes under the deep analogy between polynomials and integers. Sophisticated results in coding theory could be then carried over to cryptanalysis, and vice-versa. The generalized view raises problems of computing efficiently, which is one of the main research topics of Idealcodes.