Cryptography for Future Applications

Our lives are profoundly affected by the digitization, and the amount of sensitive data that is shared on cloud storage grows considerably every day. Whenever sensitive data is collected, manipulated, exchanged, analyzed, and retained, symmetric cryptography is used, helping to keep sensitive and personal information private, authenticated and safe.

The most commonly used and famous symmetric cryptography algorithms are AES and Keccak/SHA-3. Due to their importance, the entire research community focuses its attention on such schemes. But that doesn't just have advantages.

The great majority of the symmetric cryptography algorithms recently published resemble them. As a matter of fact, the similarity of such schemes caused a performance flatness, with no substantial improvement recently achieved. Besides, the understanding of their security has not fundamentally improved in the course of the last years. Most importantly, the current symmetric cryptographic algorithms are not suitable for several rising applications of practical importance used in real life, e.g., Zero-Knowledge and Format Preserving Encryption.

Within his ERC project, Lorenzo Grassi plans to reshape the process of designing and analyzing symmetric algorithms that operate over the integer rings, by both developing a new theoretical framework, and by constructing concrete cryptographic primitives for practical use cases.