Security Theater Seminar, Sun 22/Jan/2012 at 14:00 - All Aboard the Titanic!
Yossef Oren
Electrical Engineering Labs Building (חשמל מעבדות), Room 146 Join us virtually!
Sunday, January 22, 2:00pm
The Future of Cryptology: which 3 letters algorithm(s) could be our Titanic
Abstract: Receiving his RSA Conference Lifetime Achievement Award, Rivest said that it has not been demonstrated mathematically that factorization into primes is difficult. So “Factoring could turn out to be easy,” and according to him “maybe someone here will find the method”.
Since 1994 and Shor's algorithm, the danger of quantum computer is known: breaking RSA in polynomial time. Factoring large numbers is conjectured to be computationally infeasible on classic non quantum computers. No efficient algorithm is known and the research in the last 30 years did not show enormous progress.
According to Rivest a variety of alternative schemes have been developed in the decades since RSA was published, and a new system could probably be adopted quickly.
This relies on solving factorization only, but several other cases can be considered, in some of them the action to replace RSA with a new algorithm could require more work than initially planned (solution to discrete logarithm).
Managing the risk and the threat of the resolution of any major problem used in cryptography is crucial. This presentation challenges the conventional thinking using lessons learned from history.
RSA users are everywhere so what could be the consequences of a break in the real world? What were the errors made on the Titanic? Can the best practices used be improved or just translated into a new scheme? What would be the impact of solving the RSA assumption on cryptography?
Andrew Grove, former CEO of Intel said "Only the paranoid survive". Forecasting the presence of a strategic inflection point is hard. What to expect at the time of the next major cryptanalysis breakthrough? What history teaches? What remains to be done? Are we ready?
Speaker Bios: Jean-Jacques Quisquater is a cryptographer and a professor at Université catholique de Louvain. He holds 17 patents in the field of smart card and has published over 150 papers in journals of international conferences in the areas of graph theory and especially cryptography. He is a fellow of the IACR (International Association for Cryptology Research). David Samyde is a Senior security engineer at Witham Laboratories, Australia.
Recorded at the 28th Chaos Communication Congress (28C3), Berlin Germany, on September 27, 2011 http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/events/4766.en.html
For more information about the Security Theater, please visit: http://www.eng.tau.ac.il/~consel/SecurityTheater