CSE 546: Project Ideas (Spring 2009)
Spring 2009

Project ideas

(In progress!)

• Symmetric-key crypto
  • Block cipher modes for authenticated encryption (IACBC/IACMP, OCB,...)
  • NIST SHA Hash function competition: analyze a first-round candidate.
• Number-theoretic tools beyond those discussed in class:
  • Elliptic-curve cryptography: wikipedia
  • Lattice-based cryptography: partial bibliography; survey by Oded Regev and Daniele Micciancio.
• EC Pairings in cryptography (course notes)
  • Short signatures: Dan Boneh, Ben Lynn, and Hovav Shacham. Short signatures from the Weil pairing. J. Cryptology, 17(4):297-319, September 2004. .pdf
  • Efficient verifiable random functions: Yevgeniy Dodis and Aleksandr Yampolskiy. A verifiable random function with short proofs and keys. In Serge Vaudenay, editor, Proceedings of PKC 2005, volume 3386 of LNCS, pages 416-31. Springer-Verlag, January 2005. .ps
  • Attribute-based encryption:
    • V. Goyal, O. Pandey, A. Sahai, and B. Waters. Attribute Based Encryption for Fine- Grained Access Conrol of Encrypted Data. ACM conference on Computer and Communications Security (ACM CCS), 2006. eprint
    • Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption By John Bethencourt, Amit Sahai, and Brent Waters Proceeding of 2007 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. pdf
  • IBE without pairings: Dan Boneh, Craig Gentry, Michael Hamburg: Space-Efficient Identity Based Encryption Without Pairings. FOCS 2007: 647-657. abstract+pdf
  • MOV attack: Alfred Menezes, Tatsuaki Okamoto, Scott A. Vanstone: Reducing elliptic curve logarithms to logarithms in a finite field. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 39(5): 1639-1646 (1993).
• Algorithms for cryptographic primitives
  • Algorithms for finite field computations: Victor Shoup, A Computational Introduction to Number Theory and Algebra, Cambridge University Press, 2008.
  • Best factoring algorithms
  • Discrete Logarithm algorithms in finite fields: Slides from a talk by Anotine Joux.
• Cryptanalysis
  • Current hash competition (see above)
  • Hash function breaks: Xiaoyun Wang, Yiqun Lisa Yin, and Hongbo Yu. Finding Collisions in the Full SHA-1, CRYPTO 2005.
  • Bleichenbacher attack on RSA PKCS
  • Factoring hardware
• Secure Function Evaluation
  • Asynchronous SFE
  • Byzantine agreement protocols via crypto
  • crypto & game theory
  • completely fair crypto
  • efficient SFE: Lindell-Pinkas et al.
  • Universal composability
• Non-malleable crypto
  • Dolev-Dwork-Naor
  • Cramer-Shoup
• Deniability and anonymity
  • Efficient E-cash
  • group sigs
  • deniable authentication
  • ring sigs
  • blind signatures
  • Anonymous communication protocols
    • Mix routing
• Authenticated key exchange
• quantum crypto
  • BB84
  • crypto with quantum data
  • Zero-knowledge versus a quantum adversary
• Info-theoretic crypto:
  • Intrusion-resilience with info-theoretic security
  • fuzzy extractors and interactive protocols
  • Unconditional authentication
  • Bounded storage model
• Data privacy
  • Differential privacy
  • "attacks" on private data analysis
• Protocols for manually authenticated channels
• Pricing via processing
  • CAPTCHAs and crypto
  • Spamfighting (hash cash and co)
• Foundations
  • IP vs PSPACE
  • PRG's from OWF's
  • Statistical ZK structure
  • Hardcore bit constructions
  • GL, AkaviaGS, ...
  • BB separations
  • OWF vs P/NP
  • distributional OWF

Suggestions based on intersections with research areas

Below, I have listed topics that highlight connections between cryptography and other areas of computing research. This list is not exhaustive, but it might be a good place to start.

• Scientific computing: see "Factoring algorithms"
• Hardware
  • Factoring (TWINKLE)
  • Side channel attacks
  • Hardware implementation of a particular encryption algorithm
• Vision
  • CAPTCHAs
  • biometrics
• Networking
  • efficient protocols
  • perfectly-secure message transmission (?)
  • concurrent composition
• OS/distributed systems
  • byzantine agreement protocols from crypto:
• PL/compilers
  • computational soundness and formal methods (Abadi-Rogaway)
  • "privacy" via PL (Miklau et al, Datta et al.)
• Electrical Engineering
  • info-theoretic crypto
  • networking coding and security
  • EM side-channel attacks