Eurocrypt 2024

Invited Talks

Kenny Paterson

Title

Cryptography in the Wild

Abstract

Studying ``cryptography in the wild'' means finding examples of cryptography being used in standards, products or deployed systems, then analysing them by either finding vulnerabilities and reporting them or by building security models and proofs for the cryptographic cores of these systems. The end result of this kind of analysis is that users gain greater assurance about the security of the systems on which they rely. In this talk I’ll reflect on the methodology by which we conduct this kind of work, what it tells us about how developers see cryptography, and what we can learn from it as a community of researchers and educators.

Biography

Kenny is a full professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, where he currently serves as Head of Department and leads the Applied Cryptography Group (https://appliedcrypto.ethz.ch/). Prior to joining ETH Zurich, he was a professor with the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway, University of London. Kenny was made a Fellow of the IACR in 2017 for “research and service contributions spanning theory and practice, and improving the security of widely deployed protocols”. He was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Cryptology between 2017 and 2020. He was the conference programme chair for EUROCRYPT 2011 and an invited speaker at ASIACRYPT 2014 and PKC 2017. His research has won several awards, including an Applied Networking Research Prize from the Internet Research Task Force (2014), a PET award for outstanding research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (2015), and best paper awards at NDSS 2012, ACM CCS (2016 & 2022), IEEE S&P (2022 & 2023), CHES 2018 and IMC 2018. He is co-founder of the “Real World Cryptography” series of workshops, which provide a forum for industry and academia to come together to exchange ideas in this rapidly developing field.

Wouter Castryck

Title

An Attack Became a Tool: Isogeny-based Cryptography 2.0

Abstract

Nearly two years ago, the Supersingular Isogeny Diffie-Hellman protocol got broken completely, just a few weeks after its incarnation SIKE had advanced to the 4th round of NIST's post-quantum cryptography standardization effort. Even though the pure isogeny-finding problem is not affected by the attack, the field of isogeny-based cryptography was sent back to the drawing board. However, interestingly and perhaps surprisingly, after a brief setback, the field is actually blossoming. This is because the key ingredient of the attack, namely isogenies between higher-dimensional abelian varieties, has proven to be a powerful constructive tool, allowing for various new constructions, but also for the improvement of existing ones. The most notable example is SQISignHD, a very promising variant of the signature scheme SQISign that is now competing in the NIST competition. The goal of this talk is to give a high-level overview of both the attack and the new constructions.

Biography

Wouter obtained a PhD in mathematics at KU Leuven in 2006, under the supervision of prof. Jan Denef. He is now working as a research expert at COSIC, again at KU Leuven, in the public-key cryptography subgroup led by prof. Frederik Vercauteren. His research interests are in computational number theory and algebraic geometry, with a focus on their applications to cryptography. Most of his current research time is devoted to post-quantum cryptography, and to isogeny-based cryptography in particular.