Invited speakers

Gilles Barthe (IMDEA Software Institute, Spain)

Title: Advances in computer-aided cryptography

Abstract: Designing, analyzing and implementing correct, secure and efficient cryptography are challenging tasks. Computer-aided cryptography is a young field of research which aims to provide rigorous tools that ease these tasks. Computer-aided cryptography leverages advances in the broad area of formal methods, concerned with the development of safe and correct high-assurance systems, and in particular program verification. For security proofs, computer-aided cryptography exploits connections between reductionist arguments in provable security and a program verification method for verifying probabilistic couplings. To date, computer-aided cryptography has been used for checking reductionistic security of primitives and protocols, for analyzing the strength of implementations against side channels and physical attacks, and for synthesizing new algorithms that achieve different trade-offs between efficiency and security. The talk will present recent developments in computer-aided cryptography and reflect on some of the challenges, benefits and opportunities in computer-aided cryptography.

Nigel Smart (University of Bristol)

Title: Living Between the Ideal and Real Worlds

Abstract: I will discuss the importance of translational research which takes theoretical results and tries to turn them into practice. This work is typified as falling between two stools in our community, it is neither Crypto Theory, nor is it Applied Crypto. However, translational work is what allows our community to grow, by feeding new ideas for theoreticians and providing new objects to consider for practioneers. My talk will be illustrated mainly by stories from the recent history of MPC.