[Colloq] PhD Thesis Defense - Eric Miles - Wed. April 30, 2pm, 366 WVH - Towards bridging theory and implementation of cryptographic primitives

[Jessica Biron]

Who: Eric Miles 

When: Wed Apr 30, 2pm 

Where: 366 WVH 

Title: Towards bridging theory and implementation of cryptographic primitives 

Abstract: 

It has been widely observed that there is a significant gap between the way that many cryptographic primitives are implemented and attacked in practice, and the corresponding theoretical constructions and analyses. In this dissertation we study the construction of cryptographic primitives, with an eye towards bridging this gap. 

We first study the fundamental task of generating large amounts of random data from a short initial random seed. Theoretical constructions in this area are known as pseudorandom functions (PRFs), and despite their importance there is a gap in both efficiency and methodology when compared to practical implementations. We construct several new candidate PRFs inspired by the substitution-permutation network paradigm, which is widely used in practice but has not previously been used to construct asymptotically-secure candidate PRFs. We show that our candidates are computable more efficiently than previous candidates in a variety of computational models. 

We next study the construction of arbitrary cryptographic primitives when the adversary can obtain more information than what is afforded by the traditional "black box" model. This line of research, known as leakage-resilient cryptography , is motivated by the many so-called "side-channel attacks" that exploit implementation properties rather than the algorithm alone. As a general result, we show how to efficiently compile any algorithm into a leakage-resilient algorithm that computes the same function and is secure even in this stronger model. The security of our construction is derived from new lower bounds for computing iterated group products over the alternating group. M oreover, our construction has the potential to unify previously disjoint lines of work on this problem. 

Committee: 

Emanuele Viola (advisor), College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University 

Yevgeniy Dodis, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University 

Guevara Noubir, College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University 

Daniel Wichs, College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University