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Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

European Initiatives

FP7 & H2020 Projects

PQCRYPTO
  • 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.