Abstract:
Chen-Mou Cheng, Post-quantum cryptography and cryptanalysis
Increasingly, our society now faces all kinds of security threats as information technologies permeate
modern life. An essential prerequisite for our society and the economy to sustain is that the members
of the society can justifiably "trust" each other, for which cryptography is a cornerstone and key
enabler. Unfortunately, today’s public-key cryptography (PKC), an important building block of modern
cryptography, is threatened by the emergent thousand-qubit quantum computers.
Post-quantum cryptosystems (PQCs) are those cryptosystems that can resist the attack of quantum
computers, which will instantly break today’s most popular PKCs including RSA (Rivest-ShamirAdleman), DSA (Digital Signature Algorithm), and ECC (elliptic-curve cryptography). The most
promising candidates of PQCs include lattice-based, code-based, hash-based, as well as multivariate
PKCs. Besides representing a future-proof invest- ment, some PQCs such as multivariate PKC also
enjoy the benefit of executing much faster than their traditional counterparts on the same hardware,
making them ideal for applications in mobile and embedded systems. For example, with appropriate
architectural support, it is possible to run multivariate PKC on computing platforms with the most
stringent constraints such as passive RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags.
In this talk, I will give a high-level overview of PQC, as well as several related cryptanalysis projects
that I have worked on in recent years.