Section: Research Program

Code-based cryptography

Public-key cryptography is one of the key tools for providing network security (SSL, e-commerce, e-banking...). The security of nearly all public-key schemes used today relies on the presumed difficulty of two problems, namely factorization of large integers or computing the discrete logarithm over various groups. The hardness of those problems was questioned in 1994 (P. Shor, Algorithms for quantum computation: Discrete logarithms and factoring, FOCS 1994.) when Shor showed that a quantum computer could solve them efficiently. Though large enough quantum computers that would be able to threaten the existing cryptosystems do not exist yet, the cryptographic research community has to get ready and has to prepare alternatives. This line of work is usually referred to as post-quantum cryptography. This has become a prominent research field. Most notably, an international call for post-quantum primitives (http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/post-quantum-crypto/) has been launched by the NIST, with a submission deadline in November 2017.

The research of the project-team in this field is focused on the design and cryptanalysis of cryptosystems making use of coding theory. Code-based cryptography is one the main techniques for post-quantum cryptography (together with lattice-based, multivariate, or hash-based cryptography).