Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

European Initiatives

LattAC ERC grant

Participants : Shi Bai, Laurent Grémy, Gottfried Herold, Elena Kirshanova, Fabien Laguillaumie, Huyen Nguyen, Alice Pellet--Mary, Miruna Rosca, Damien Stehlé, Alexandre Wallet, Weiqiang Wen.

Damien Stehlé was awarded an ERC Starting Grant for his project Euclidean lattices: algorithms and cryptography (LattAC) in 2013 (1.4Meur for 5 years from January 2014). The LattAC project aims at studying all computational aspects of lattices, from algorithms for manipulating them to applications. The main objective is to enable the rise of lattice-based cryptography.

PROMETHEUS Project

Participants : Laurent Grémy, Fabien Laguillaumie, Benoît Libert, Damien Stehlé.

PROMETHEUS (Privacy-Preserving Systems from Advanced Cryptographic Mechanisms Using Lattices) is a 4-year European H2020 project (call H2020-DS-2016-2017, Cybersecurity PPP Cryptography, DS-06-2017) that started in January 2018. It gathers 8 academic partners (ENS de Lyon and Université de Rennes 1; CWI, Pays-Bas; IDC Herzliya, Israel; Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom; Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain; Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany; Weizmann Institute, Israel), 4 industrial partners (Orange, Thales, TNO, Scytl). The goal of this project is to develop a toolbox of privacy-preserving cryptographic algorithms and protocols (like group signatures, anonymous credentials, or digital cash systems) that resist quantum adversaries. Solutions will be mainly considered in the context of Euclidean lattices and they will be analyzed from a theoretical point of view (i.e., from a provable security aspect) and a practical angle (which covers the security of cryptographic implementations and side-channel leakages). The project is hosted by ENS de Lyon and Benoît Libert is the administrative coordinator while Orange is the scientific leader.

Other international projects

IFCPAR grant: “Computing on Encrypted Data: New Paradigms in Functional Encryption”

Participants : Benoît Libert, Damien Stehlé.

3-year project accepted in July 2018. Expected beginning on January 1, 2019. Benoît Libert is co-PI with Shweta Agrawal (IIT Madras, India). Budget on the French side amounts to 100k€.

Functional encryption is a paradigm that enables users to perform data mining and analysis on encrypted data. Users are provided cryptographic keys corresponding to particular functionalities which enable them to learn the output of the computation without learning anything about the input. Despite recent advances, efficient realizations of functional encryption are only available for restricted function families, which are typically represented by small-depth circuits: indeed, solutions for general functionalities are either way too inefficient for pratical use or they rely on uncertain security foundations like the existence of circuit obfuscators (or both). This project will explore constructions based on well-studied hardness assumptions and which are closer to being usable in real-life applications. To this end, we will notably consider solutions supporting other models of computation than Boolean circuits – like Turing machines – which support variable-size inputs. In the context of particular functionalities, the project will aim for more efficient realizations that satisfy stronger security notions.