[SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT] Pauline Sperry Undergraduate Lecture & Gerrymandering Conference
Berkeley MUSA
Speaker: Dr. Kristin Lauter, Microsoft Research
Title: How to Keep your Secrets in a Post-Quantum World
Abstract: This talk will give an overview of the history of various hard problems in number theory which are used as the basis for cryptosystems. I will survey the evolution of attacks and discuss the upcoming NIST competition to standardize new cryptographic schemes for a post-quantum world. I will present some current proposals for post-quantum systems based on supersingular isogeny graphs of elliptic curves and lattice-based cryptosystems in cyclotomic number fields. Supersingular Isogeny Graphs were proposed for use in Cryptography in 2006 by Charles-Goren-Lauter, and are currently being considered as candidates for standardization in several tracks of the 2017 NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography International Competition. These are Ramanujan graphs whose nodes are supersingular elliptic curves and edges are isogenies between them.
Kristin Estella Lauter is a mathematician and cryptographer whose research areas are number theory, algebraic geometry, and applications to cryptography. She is particularly known for her work on homomorphic encryption, elliptic curve cryptography, and for introducing supersingular isogeny graphs as a hard problem into cryptography. She is a Principal Researcher and Research Manager of the Cryptography Group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington. She served as President of the Association for Women in Mathematics from 2015 –2017. She has published more than 100 papers and holds more than 50 patents.
In 2008, Lauter and her coauthors were awarded the Selfridge Prize in Computational Number Theory. She was elected to the 2015 Class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to arithmetic geometry and cryptography as well as service to the community." In 2017, she was selected as a fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics in the inaugural class, and as the 2018-2020 Polya Lecturer for the Mathematical Association of America.
Lauter received her BA, MS, and Ph.D degrees in mathematics from the University of Chicago, in 1990, 1991, and 1996, respectively. Prior to joining Microsoft, she held positions as a visiting scholar at Max Planck Institut fur Mathematik in Bonn, Germany (1997), T.H. Hildebrandt Research Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan (1996-1999), and a visiting researcher at Institut de Mathematiques Luminy in France (1999).
She is a co-founder of the Women in Numbers Network, a research collaboration community for women in number theory, and she is the lead PI for the AWM NSF Advance Grant (2015-2020) to create and sustain research networks for women in all areas of mathematics. She serves on the Board of Trustees of MSRI, the Advisory Board of the Banff International Research Station and has served on the Council of the American Mathematical Society (2014-2017).