W4261 Introduction to Cryptography: Relevant Links

• Correspondence regarding cryptography between John Nash and the NSA: In 1955, John Nash was in correspondence with the NSA, which was declassified by the NSA in 2012. Nash proposed a novel enciphering scheme, which on its own is not secure according to current, modern crypto best practices (which developed decades later); see, e.g., an attack presented by Adi Shamir and Eldad Zinger. However, Nash was well ahead of his time, and set forth important pricinples that now underpin modern computational complexity theory and cryptography. In particular, he proposes a natural definition for "[security] in a practical sense --- that exponential computational effort is required for an enemy to recover a secret key" (this was before computational complexity theory was developed!). You can view the original letters, or their transcription, made by Mike Rosulek.
• Recent Cryptography Awards

  • Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali won the 2012 ACM Turing Award for Advances in Cryptography. The Turing award is known as the "Nobel prize for computer science" (it was just announced that the prize went up from $250,000 to $1,000,000). They received it for "pioneering the field of provable security, which laid the mathematical foundations that made modern cryptography possible" (read the whole citation above -- they came up with many of the things we study in class!).
  
  
  • Previous Turing awards related to cryptography were given to Manuel Blum (1995), Andrew Chi-Chih Yao (2000), Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman (2002). Michael Rabin also did important work in cryptography, although his Turing award is from an earlier time, and focuses on his invention of non-deterministic finite automata.
  
  
  • Very recently, Craig Gentry received the MacArthur Fellowship (aka "the genius award"), $625,000, for his breakthrough results in cryptography, including fully homomorphic encryption.

• Some attacks (among many) on practical systems:
  
  
  • POODLE attack: September 2014 padding oracle attack against SSL3.
  
  
  • An attack on Google maps over SSL, exploiting the fact that encryption always leaks information about the length of the plaintext (as we mentioned in class and showed in recitation).

• Bar-Ilan Winter School on Symmetric Cryptography: Last year, Bar Ilan university organized a winter school on symmetric key encryption in theory and in practice. Details are available here, including slides and youtube videos for each of the lectures. In particular, Kenny Paterson presented a description and attacks on the TLS protocol, including padding oracle attacks such as BEAST mentioned in class (and similar to POODLE), RC4 attacks, and much more.
• eSTREAM project: The eSTREAM project was a multi-year effort, running from 2004 to 2008, to promote the design of efficient and compact stream ciphers suitable for widespread adoption. As a result of the project, a portfolio of new stream ciphers was announced in April 2008. The eSTREAM portfolio was revised in September 2008, and currently contains seven stream ciphers, including Trivium that was mentioned in class. The project website can be found here.
• SHA3: NIST's SHA-3 Competition, and their final round report, where Keccak was selected from the five hash function finalists.
• "New Directions in Cryptography", by Diffie and Hellman: The 1976 paper by Diffie and Hellman
  solves the key exchange problem by introducing public key encryption and the Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol. It also introduces digital signatures, and shows how it can be implemented using public key cryptography.
• Recommended Key Lengths: See http://www.keylength.com/ for recommendations of various groups regarding key length choices. These include, among others, the recommendations of NIST (US National Institute of Standards and Technology) as well as ECRYPT II (European Network of Excellence in Cryptology II).

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